Word: schisgal
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...Jimmy Shine goes, Playwright Schisgal (Luv, The Typist, The Tiger) is very lucky to have Hoffman's ingratiating stage personality working for him. Hoffman takes thimblefuls of humor, absurdity, poignance, honesty, desire and passion and drains them as if they were foaming crystal goblets of dramatic life...
...play is a journey. It can be an outward journey through time, place and action. Or it can be an inner journey through mood, psyche and character. Murray Schisgal's Jimmy Shine attempts an inner journey. The trouble is that it doesn't go anywhere. Jimmy Shine is a transparent character: to see him once is to know him totally. He is a luckless misadventurer, a congenital flunker in the school of life, a born loser with a ready quip for a pick-me-up. Jimmy Shine does not grow, change, or develop, he simply recapitulates himself...
...fragmented, sketchy way that Schisgal has written it, Jimmy Shine is like a book in which the text has been thrown away and the footnotes published. If it has any style, it might be called urban picaresque. In his Greenwich .Village flat. Jimmy (Dustin Hoffman) stumbles through episodes from his past, present and fantasy lives. Several of the scenes, and Hoffman's part itself, recall his film role as a social dropout in The Graduate. Though the audience never sees him painting, Jimmy is an abstractionist and a dud at it. He is a glutton for humiliation...
...Sugar Plum, he has written about a meeting between a coed artist and the boy who had run over and killed her finance with his car. The whole thing is ludicrous in a Murray Schisgal sort of way; no sooner does the girl arrive, indignant over the death of the man she loved, than she sets out to make it with the killer...
JIMMY SHINE, another entry by Murray Schisgal, with The Graduate's Dustin Hoffman. A young artist's best friend makes it as a real estate tycoon...