Word: slade
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TRIBUTE by Bernard Slade...
...Slade stops at Scottie's discovery of his emotional insulation, never digging any deeper into the roots of his fears--you know, the primal stuff. Tribute winds up pat and tidy, without plunging us into the existential abyss that can make this sort of thing a real corker. The tragedy of the American sit-com writer has turned out awfully shallow. This bathos gives Jack Lemmon his star turn: fast-food epiphany, downstage center. Neither he nor Slade really needed this--although it must be fun to break down onstage. Tribute slobbers when it ought only to quiver; the mask...
Tribute is a rich play, not brilliant but solid. The characters who surround the protagonist--his sympathetic ex-wife, tolerant, devoted doctor, et al--are stock, but Slade fuses each of them with life. As a one-time writer of sit-coms (over 100, it is reported), he must have learned how to play around with stereotypes, searching for that one little crack of humanity in which to insert his fingers, opening the character up. Scottie's business partner, for example, is a huggable, Jewish, Lou Jacobi-type (warmly played by A. Larry Haines), the character who kids in plays...
...Slade is also an accomplished writer of one-liners, which are not only funny but rooted in universal human fears. "When a friend dies, you lose a friend," sighs Scottie, "but when you die, you lose all your friends." There's more in that than just a well-turned phrase. A few lines don't work, and the play could use some trimming before it settles down in New York. One rude piece of psychological claptrap ought to be immediately excised: one of those Death of a Salesman-type closet skeletons, involving the time when little Jud woke...
...SHOULD get in to Boston to see Tribute--its smash-hit success on Broadway is a foregone conclusion (and if gaseous schlock like Deathtrap, which opened here in January, can be a hit, well--anything goes). Tribute must strike very close to the bones of some of its contributors: Slade, still struggling to shake off Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, and Lemmon, a graduate of the Hasty Pudding chorus line and academic probation at Harvard. These men, at some point in their lives, decided to stop clowning around and get serious. Both are at a point where their deepening...