Word: blots
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Terry Won't Talk springs from the refusal of Terry Blade (Mark Linn-Baker) to communicate with his family; as sister Suzy (Marilyn Caskey) announces at the outset, "Momma! Terry won't talk!" Terry becomes a sort of walking Rorschach blot, upon whom each of the characters projects an explanation for his silence: his mother (Elizabeth Norment) thinks someone lied to him; his teacher (Nancy Mayans) thinks he's ill; the principal (John Bottoms) sees it as the silence of a poet; and Mrs. Blade's lover, Chester, who seems to be a regular reader of Existential Digest, ascribes...
...only blot on the premiere is Kenneth Ryan, who lacks a sense of comic timing as Wheeler, stepping on some of Leib's best laugh lines. Which is a shame, because Terry is a very funny play, and depends on its humor to reach those for whom absurdism is not an assumption. (I am thinking particularly of the middle-aged audience that grew up with, not after Camus...