Word: witting
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There is more P. G. Wodehouse in The Do-Gooders than the deadly amoral wit of Bruce Jay Friedman or Joseph Heller. The true black humorists spring from Franz Kafka, Céline, James Joyce and Nathanael West. Imitations like this owe their origins to the pop-art Campbell soup cans, underground "art" movies, and the overpowering amplification systems that give rock music its driving force...
Babe's jogging insight is thus reflected in the careful contrivances of plot elements. The dialogue is truly gifted for its dramatically effective journalism and in addition there is Babe's irresistable sense of wit, a dark and noxious poison that one sniffs for the resulting quiver...
Thus the General, played by Ronald Hunter, is kept fulminating for the whole time at a steady roar--the wit of so many of his lines gets lost in the over-blown bustle. This is not the actor's fault but follows from the director's faulty conception of the play. Hunter is more controlled in the scene (in both senses of the word) with his bedridden wife (Sheila Hart...
...tone of the issue thus is more somber than usual but it is laced with flashes of the most exalted wit, tender and crafty outbursts from the blue depths of the underground sea that these people inhabit. The prose-poetic style is the one we have come to expect of all hippie writing. Only, here it is better than usual--controlled wild lurching from fancy to dirt, with logic running like a deep undercurrent, that occasionally surfaces but more often is just stubbornly felt...
...eclecticism by Sarah Gates and played on Howard Cutler's elegant and functional set, all the cameras, flashlights, modern tunes, and anachronistic props, however funny, cannot take the show away from its brilliant and dedicated cast. Dean Gitter's fascinating Bottom remains the most difficult performance to fathom: his "wit" in the scenes with Titania almost passes for just that, and his death scene as Pyramus reveals Bottom, unbelievably, a capable actor--capable at least of temporarily affecting Theseus and Hippolyta, played superbly by Tommy Lee Jones and Lynette Saxe...