Scar Tissue

By T.E. Kalem

GROWNUPS by Jules Feiffer

Laughter is no laughing matter in this play. In between one-liners and running gags, the characters on the stage of Broadway's Lyceum Theater shout and scream at one another. Their confrontations contain a sly malice, suppressed rage and maddening frustration. As comedy, Grownups is scar-tissue deep.

Utilizing autobiographical elements, Feiffer performs major surgery on an American Jewish family. He draws blood and then salts the wounds. His hero, Jake (Bob Dishy), is a well-regarded journalist in early middle age with a secure post on the New York Times. He seems agreeably married to an attractive wife, Louise (Cheryl Giannini), and they have a perky seven-year-old daughter named Edie (Jennifer Dundas).

All is not as it seems. Jake bitterly feels that he has been maimed rather than reared, and in his sister's kitchen we meet his parents. His father Jack (Harold Gould) is a raspy nonentity with a taste for booze and two unvarying questions on his lips: "So what's new?" and "When am I gonna see my granddaughter?"

Jake's mother Helen (Frances Sternhagen) is a tyrant of the hearth. She has X-ray eyes, but she can discern no conceivable virtue in anyone who disputes her dictums about food, home furnishings and the proper cowing of a child. She has a deep-freeze heart, and Jake had been stored there until he could be thawed out by externally approved success at the newspaper. For Jake's mother and father, the Times is the Talmud.

Jake is writing a book about "the moral and ethical disintegration of the American dream," and Grownups seems shackled to that thesis. For few explicable reasons, Jake and Louise crush each other in a rockslide of a marital spat that rivals the venom but not the wit of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?ln an explosive but faintly ludicrous finale, all the family pieties are blasted and blasphemed.

The cast is marvelously adept, especially Sternhagen and Dishy. She never camouflages the essential hideousness of the character she portrays, and he distills a tormenting anguish from the dregs of self-pity.

In his cartoons, Jules Feiffer has saucily lampooned the neurotic as thinker. In previous plays (Little Murders; Hold Me; Knock Knock), he has caricatured U.S. society as a surrealistic maze of false values. In Grownups, he simply utters a scream of pain. -- By T.E. Kalem

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