Jest Match

By T.E. Kalem

A COUPLA WHITE CHICKS SITTING AROUND TALKING by John Ford Noonan

Whatever the sociological pressure gauges are recording on the state of women's lib, Playwright Noonan has written a lighter-than-air comedy on female bonding.

At first glance, the women in this two-character play seem singularly unbondable. Maude Mix (Susan Sarandon) is a prim, orderly Westchester housewife. Her decorator-designed kitchen qualifies as a picture spread in Better Homes and Gardens, and her life seems to mirror her kitchen. When the curtain rises, Maude is meticulously folding laundry and baking chocolate chip cookies for charity. As if to modify these rituals, she breaks into a wild disco dance to the strains of Gimme Shelter.

Enter her new lawn-distance neighbor. Hannah Mae Bindler (Eileen Brennan), a Lone-Star State emigree, is wearing a garish outfit, and her accessories are an unstoppered tongue and the musk of a rampant libido. Culture clash soon gives way to kaffeeklatsch. Maude reveals that her husband is off on one of his adulterous secretarial safaris. Despite having suffered the occasional infidelity, Hannah Mae claims that her husband Carl Joe "don't take a breath unless I say, 'Carl Joe, breathe.'"

The two women head for Manhattan and a weekend of retaliatory hedonism.

They swear to enjoy a monthly weekend sabbatical from their spouses. Maude delivers an impassioned emancipation proclamation. Smashing jars of preserves on the immaculate floor, she vows: "I hereby relinquish my addiction to everything being where it oughta be! ... I salute the few guys who have something to offer and wish death on the rest!!"

In White Chicks, Noonan seems to put forth the disputable proposition that if women act as predators and treat men as sex objects, the grievances between the sexes will be solved. Mostly he concentrates on his strength, which is poker-faced parodies of attitudes and language, and he plays his best lines close to the jest.

Director Dorothy Lyman has meshed the two women's disparate natures with the controlled firmness of the potter's hand. Brennan has the personality of a vulnerable bulldozer, while Sarandon arcs over and under her emotional crises like a dolphin.

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