Tender Spats

By T.E.K.

"I OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES" by Neil Simon

Simon slays. His weapon is customarily murderous laughter. It is not quite like that this tune around. The laughs are ample yet muted and subordinated to a story in which a father and a daughter tug at each other's heartstrings. In terms of standard Simon fare, this comedy is almost a poignant tearjerker.

The father, Herb (Ron Leibman) formerly a successful screenwriter, now has a seemingly terminal case of writer's block. He is bantering away his life. Asked if he owns the West Hollywood Spanish stucco quarters he lives in, he answers, "Hell, no. The apartment belongs to six termites who lease it to four mice, and I rent it from them." An off-and-on bedmate, Steffy (Joyce Van Patten) completes Herb's agile menage.

But not after Libby (Dinah Manoff) appears, with no advance notice. Libby, 19, is the daughter Herb had deserted when he left New York after a divorce. A tomboy sort, wearing green-bordered knee socks and walking boots, Libby has trekked across the country to find out what her father is like. She suffers instant disenchantment. Dressed in seedy duds with a baseball cap glued to his head, Herb is not at all the David Niven type, with pipe, Great Danes, and book-lined living room, that Libby had envisioned.

Nonetheless, the two are drawn to each other in large and little tendernesses and spats. This is where the play drifts into emotions of sitcom dimensions. Herb falls in love with Libby, not incestuously, but romantically and possessively. Libby's mocking jests cannot hide the scars of the unrestorable years. At one point, she pins Herb down, demanding to know why he divorced her mother. Herb rather lamely answers that the lady totally lacked a sense of humor. Logically, this is the weak point of the play. A man as perceptive as Herb would have spotted a congenital non-laugher during the months of his premarital affair with her. Simon teases out the finale of "I Ought to Be in Pictures" with a mini-surprise.

Under Herbert Ross's assured hand, the actors perform with impeccable honesty. Leibman moves from farcical jocularity to bleeding anguish. In a sketchy role, Van Patten displays warming femininity. When she is not biting into a juicy comic line, Manoff clings like a valorous terrier to her prey of hope.

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