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By T.E. Kalem

THE FLOATING LIGHT BULB by Woody Allen A pearl of a playwright may emerge from the oyster bed of a wretched early home life. O'Neill, Williams and Miller provide eloquently autobiographical testimony to that. Woody Allen's The Floating Light Bulb seems distinctly autobiographical, but it is no more than a shucked oyster shell of a play.

Brooklyn, 1945. The Pollacks are bone-poor. They lead lives of congealed desperation, though their dialogue sometimes glints with the leapfrog logic of Allen's idiosyncratic humor.

Max (Danny Aiello), the father, is a low-paid waiter and loudmouthed gambler who dreams of hitting the numbers big so that he can run away with his popsy (Ellen March). The domineering mother Enid (Beatrice Arthur) has a tongue with the sting of a killer bee. The 17-year-old son Paul (Brian Backer) has a sky-high IQ and plays truant to go to magic shows. Abysmally lonely, he retreats to his room to polish his own legerdemain, as Allen's boy figure did in the film Stardust Memories. Running into a flyweight booking agent (Jack Weston), Enid wheedles him into auditioning Paul. Terrified, the boy flubs a few tricks and becomes ill. In a total tangent, Enid and the agent embark on a bittersweet mating waltz that ends sourly.

Topping an able cast, Backer and Weston give performances of impelling honesty. But the play lacks internal consistency of tone, and Allen has botched at least four essentials in the magic of theater--surprise, imagination, vision and revelation. --By T.E. Kalem

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