Word: murph
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...head of Princeton's physics department, Atomic Scientist Marvin ("Murph") Goldberger, 56, was so happy in his work that he turned away presidential-search committees from a number of universities. That was before he was asked to run the California Institute of Technology. Says Goldberger, who was formally inaugurated last week as the fourth president of 87-year-old Caltech: "As a scientist, I felt I had no choice but to take it. This is an incredible place...
...York adolescents. It's kind of culturally telling, you know, how they free associate from Turks and Indians to Native Americans and that most pious national holiday, Thanksgiving, then face off over whether or not their old ladies hump gobblers. The sociologist from HEW will tell us why Murph doesn't have anyone to go home to and devise training programs for sweet lady social workers so they don't give knives (for whittling wood) to hoodlums on a rap for slicing kids. Somewhere near the middle of the play, the Irish character confides in his buddy, Joey...
Along with thematic shallowness, the play suffers from dramatic ineptitude. During one of their continuing series of brawls, Joey flings his crony Murph out of the audience's field of view. It takes Murph a full ten minutes to find his way back on stage, and when Joey, his curiosity rightfully piqued, grills him as to what could have occupied him for so long in the middle of the desolate night, Murph fails to provide an adequate answer. Not that the audience cares much. But it's kind of annoying to be faced with evidence of writer's block...
...then there's the self-consciously artistic way Horovitz sandwiches the action between the refrain of a popular song wafting in from the wings. The sappy, off-key message is that Murph and Joey, poor lost crime-ridden souls, are "lookin' for your door and can't find it." Horovitz's technique is too glib, too conventional...
HAPPILY, director Paul Suchecki has offset the poorly chosen script with a fine pair of actors. Ed Redlich's Murph swaggers and spits his lines with the air of someone who is not too bright but whose instinct will take care of him; he's like a chubby rodent that senses when to burrow and when to flee. Alan Stock plays a jittery boy with a cramped intelligence. His Joey is more attuned to emotions than is Murph: the taut nervousness in his shying gait, as though his hip joints were connected to his insteps by elastic bands, seems...