Word: playwrightes
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...MacGraw. He is Max, a fast-dealing, fast-talking zillionaire with a penchant for keeping women in overdecorated Manhattan pads. She is "Bones," a TV producer and longtime protégée who revolts against Max by making careerist demands and carrying on with an off-off-Broadway playwright (Peter Weller). King is too much of a pussycat to convey the hero's toughness, but he delivers Allen's best sallies with crackling speed ("I'll tell you who lives in New Jersey! Cousins live in New Jersey!"). Though MacGraw is no comedian, she is animated...
...other roles are well cast, but only Tony Roberts' gay Hollywood magnate is clearly drawn. Dina Merrill, while quite nutty as Max's institutionalized wife, is left stranded between farce and tragedy. The playwright is inconsistently written as both a pretentious aesthete and an idealized heartthrob; finally his plot strand peters out, and poor Weller disappears without explanation. By then, Allen and Lumet have forsaken both laughter and romance for some muddy philosophizing: Hollywood deal making, it abruptly turns out, is a metaphor for male-female relationships. Maybe so, but it is hard to believe that the creators...
There is a narrow line between sentimentality and mawkishness, and not many writers can walk it without falling into the swamp of syrupy sugar waiting below. Eduardo de Filippo, the Italian playwright, is a rare exception. Filumena, which ran for two years in London, may be the easiest, most companionable show on Broadway. It is warm, undemanding and, in its own modest way, always enjoyable...
Pacino trundles Serpico-style to Greenwich Village and sets up shop. He spends days with his nextdoor neighbor, Ted (Don Scardino), a gay playwright ("you know, boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy gets analyst") who is scared to death of cruising, preferring to frequent more traditional gay cafes that Friedkin never shows. Nights, Pacino cruises, donning his leather outfit like a pudgy boy pulling on his first Halloween costume. Later, of course, the leather will no longer be a costume and Pacino will stop fumbling with the cruising paraphernalia. He will fit into the crowd in that hole across...
...Playwright Lapine writes amusing lines. At one point the mother asks the younger son why he doesn't get a job. An immigrant matriarch, her next question is pencil-point sharp: "Why did you go to college?" His riposte: "To avoid being asked questions like this after high school." One of the distinctly appealing aspects of Table Settings is its benign ami ability. Even when Lapine's characters verge on cartoons, he presents them as en dearingly human in their follies, desires and genetically nutty ways. His direction of his own play is brisk, and his cast...