Word: scooper
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...Ethel Is an Elephant. She is indeed, and she shares a loft with a young Manhattan photographer, who has to fight both the city and his landlord to keep her there. Once he-or the show's writer-finds out about New York's new antilitter pooper-scooper law, he may not fight so hard. But perhaps he is thinking of asking the garbagemen at ABC and NBC to come and help...
Unfortunately, the play consists mostly of such clumsy commentary. It's got only three characters: Henny (mother), Scooper (son), and Dierdre (bibliophile cum girlfriend). 83 and blind, Henny, has battled breast cancer for two years without anybody catching on--hence bosoms and neglect. Scooper, never too lucky with the girls, was about to run off to Haiti with his best friend's wife when Mom's illness was uncovered. He met Dierdre through their common analyst, Dr. James. In her apartment, while Henny's on the operating table, they spill out their tribulations and prayers. Their idiocyncrasies, it seems, know...
...this which takes up about 45 minutes, is funny, But it's abruptly interrupted by Scooper's semi-Oedipal urge to call his ailing mother at Presbyterian. They put him on hold, and at this point he loses it. He hurls the Byron the lovers once caressed about the apartment, with all her precious books. Insanity, it seems, is contagious: she grabs a letter opener and stabs him. From here, the scene changes to the hospital where he and his mother spend an hour and a half rehashing their unimaginative pasts, their guilt, their dreams. He even has a Rosebud...
...three of the characters are so consistently loco that we become dulled by it. There should be a doorman or a maid or something--someone to set off the shrieking and flyings ashtrays. That, or a tauter script. After the play's rambling dialogues, its climactic scene in which Scooper leaves his blind mother talking to a wheelchair while he and Dierdre run off (to Doubleday?) leaves you cold...
Within the confines of this problematic script, the three actors do not perform poorly. Richard Kavanaugh (Scooper) thrives on the satirical scenes, timing his funniest lines well, and delivering them in a booming baritone that reverbrates about the small theatre. He wears a sardonic frown that embodies his contempt for the culture he lives in. But he acts out his irrational moments less convincingly. The abrupt transition from penthouse humor to breakdown is ungraceful because he tries to express his disorder by physical rampaging rather than verbal interpretation. And the baritone he exploited earlier is over-exercised; like the play...