Word: friedman
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SCUBA DUBA is a flagellatingly funny first play by Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman about an American screwball whose wife runs off with a Negro during a Riviera holiday. Jerry Orbach is jokingly brilliant as he indiscriminately sprays comic vitriol at countless pet hates. Brenda Smiley is a wriggly delight as a lass with a mini-mind and a Proustian remembrance of flings past...
...from play wrights such as Albee and Pinter, is cruel, taut-nerved, and speaks the lingo of the obscene and the absurd, not funny-ha-ha but funny-peculiar. The new humor reigns in off-Broadway's Scuba Duba, a flagellatingly funny first play by Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman (Stern, A Mother's Kisses...
Throughout the play Friedman lances pet hates with an ardor so indiscriminate as to seem bracingly honest. The air is unfogged by any pious cant about brotherly love as he tongue-twits Jews, Negroes, Babbitts, Frenchmen, Chinese, Yugoslavs, white liberals, black militants, wives, husbands, thieves and psychiatrists. From this last and presumably lowest shelf of humanity, the playwright produces a fatuously brain-shrunk specimen who brings his patient-paramour to the chateau. She in turn treats Manhattan's theatergoers to the sight of their first topless actress, but it must ungallantly be recorded that the lady's mammaries...
Early and logically Friedman says: "There's just no right way to be about Negroes." In Act II, Harold's wife shows up with two Negroes, the skindiver and the man she really loves, a Brooks Brothers type who recites poetry and cherishes her femininity. Harold is more deeply nonplussed than he was by the notion of his wife's surrender to a typical minstrel man who is also a switch blade artist and a sexual athlete. Playgoers may be equally nonplussed by the belated stab at seriousness, especially after Friedman's nightlong skill at making...
Astronomer Friedman would like next to monitor 3C 273's X-ray luminosity to determine if it varies as widely as the quasar's visible light. He would also like to get an X-ray spectrum, which might help unlock more of the quasars secrets. Either procedure would require a longer look at quasar X rays than can be obtained during the fleeting minutes that an X-ray telescope can be rocketed above the earth's atmosphere. The answer, Friedman says, is an X-ray telescope in an orbiting satellite or, better yet, one on the surface...