The Bunch That Won't Die

By Richard Zoglin

Here's the story

Of a lovely lady

Who was bringing up

Three very lovely girls . . .

Ah, that familiar old TV theme. Or perhaps we should say, "Aaarggh, that cursed song again!" Just which reaction you have may define your place on the ! '90s generational spectrum. For the twenty-something crowd, the opening strains of The Brady Bunch -- the early '70s sitcom about two single-parent families that merge into one wholesome household -- recall a corny-but-lovable TV companion from childhood. For those with longer memories, it is a reminder of the insipid depths to which TV's family shows sank in the years between Leave It to Beaver and the Norman Lear revolution.

The Brady clan -- three boys, three girls, two parents (Florence Henderson and Robert Reed) and Alice, the wisecracking maid (Ann B. Davis) -- has puttered along in reruns ever since the show's cancellation in 1974 after five seasons on ABC. Now it has re-emerged, on the stage, in a bizarre bit of media reversal called The Real Live Brady Bunch. Mounted by a Chicago alternative- theater troupe, the show is alarmingly simple in concept. Episodes of the old sitcom are merely re-enacted, scene for scene, line for line. (A new episode is performed every week; a game-show parody fills out the evening.)

It's all here: the bouncy opening (with all the characters grinning at one another in a Hollywood Squares-style grid), the featherbrained plots (Marcia tries to juggle two dates for the same night, then gets bopped on the nose by a football), the inane dialogue ("I think your problem isn't a swollen nose," says Dad to Marcia, "it's a bruised conscience"), the musical punctuation marks, even spurts of canned laughter. It is, depending on your point of view, either a tribute to a classic piece of TV kitsch or the End of Theater As We Know It.

Whichever, it's the brainchild of Faith and Jill Soloway, sisters and members of Chicago's Metraform Theater, an underground group whose other theatrical pranks have included Coed Prison Sluts, The Miss Vagina Pageant and That Darned Antichrist. One afternoon last year an actor friend of theirs, Becky Thyre, was at Faith's home entertaining them with an impersonation of Marcia, the eldest Brady girl. A light bulb went off for the trio of self- described "Brady obsessors": Why not put an entire Brady episode onstage? "We discussed screwing with the story lines and updating them, making them not so innocent," says Faith, 27. "But we decided that just doing it straight would be enough."

Quite enough. The Real Live Brady Bunch opened at Chicago's Annoyance Theater in June 1990 and ran for 14 months to packed houses. This fall it moved to New York City, where it is drawing enthusiastic crowds at that haven of hip, the Village Gate. The audience roars in recognition, laughs at all the dumb lines and sometimes shouts them out before the actors. "We hated the show then and we hate it now," said one recent visitor, "but it's very funny."

The performers go at their task with deadpan aplomb, yet there are fine gradations of irony. Thyre does a wicked impersonation of Marcia, the button- nose teen queen. Melanie Hutsell, by contrast, is goofily off kilter as her sister Jan, a flower child waiting to blossom beneath her wire-rim glasses. Mari Weiss skewers an entire genre with her hilarious Alice -- fist on hip, snapping off bad one-liners with brassy self-assurance. Except for a brief coda (the kids mime dope smoking and sex acts to the accompaniment of the Jefferson Airplane lyric "Go ask Alice . . ."), it's all played demonically straight. You gotta love it. Or loathe it.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York