The Patient Is Impatient

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: WRONG TURN AT LUNGFISH

AUTHORS: GARRY MARSHALL AND LOWELL GANZ

WHERE: OFF-BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: George C. Scott's trademark irascibility cannot salvage a hospital comedy by two Hollywood hands.

The best moment is the first, when an old lion of a man taps his way, tentative yet trying to be ferocious, toward the hospital bed at center stage. He removes wraparound dark glasses to reveal eyes that do not focus, that plainly cannot see. He fumbles, with slow majesty, to untie the sash of his robe. An audience cannot help feeling the brave pathos of the character and the star power of the actor. Unfortunately, at this point the play's dialogue begins, and the illusion of believability slips irretrievably away.

Every season, it seems, brings some new sentimental comedy about terminal illness, usually involving some old curmudgeon's coming to rosy terms with the imperfections of the world he is about to leave. These plays, whose "reality" is rooted not in life but in prior plays, movies and TV, shy away from the raw emotions of fear and grief and the harsh facts of the body's decline, trivializing the eternal mystery they pretend to revere. What makes Wrong Turn at Lungfish more than usually disappointing is that most such plays don't have George C. Scott (although last season's revival of the similarly smarmy On Borrowed Time did), and most are not written by Hollywood veterans whose creative credits number Pretty Woman, City Slickers and A League of Their Own (plus, it must be admitted, Laverne and Shirley). For that matter, most do not have TV hunk Tony Danza (Taxi, Who's the Boss?), making his New York stage debut as a hoodlum. (For important plot reasons, he is supposed to be about 27, but Danza looks a dozen years older.)

The authors have taken a standard sitcom premise -- mismatched people, in this case Scott as a college professor and Jami Gertz as the barely literate young volunteer who reads to him because he is blind -- then lumbered it with portentous yet unpursued references to battered women, child abuse, academic plagiarism, organized crime and the Bataan Death March (not to mention Beethoven's deafness, Baudelaire's profligacy and the evolutionary significance of the animal in the title). Despite these highfalutin distractions, the story trudges along to its always foreseeable end: the old man dies but lives on in the young woman he has persuaded to make something better of herself.

The laughs, and there are plenty, come mostly from Scott's trademark vocabulary of gestures for impatience -- the wide-eyed glare, the bellow, the thundering crash of his heel for emphasis as he tells the long-winded young woman, "Short! Short!" About two hours shorter would have been best for this whole two-hour enterprise.