Word: wren
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...down-at-the-heels private eye named Russel Wren is suddenly victimized by a series of increasingly vigorous beatings. Someone, perhaps everyone, is out to get him, and Wren naturally wants to find out why. One good reason may be his mouth. A former college English teacher, the shamus speaks in Victorian grandiloquent, and the burden of his remarks is composed of snippets from the Great Books and library paste. Wren cannot even make a kinky pass at his secretary without providing footnotes: "Dante finds Beatrice in heaven, on one side of the Lord, with none other than the Virgin...
...calls for baroque extravagance and Berger provides plenty. Esoteric words ("canescing," "superfetation," "glabrous") gambol freely with lowlife slang. Natalie Novotny, Wren's girl friend, refuses his offer to pay for dinner because he has already picked up the Czech. Objects and people are described in loopy, gargantuan locutions. A chandelier becomes a "hippodrome for silverfish"; an incidental character has "the dental terrain of a boar...
...worst thing about it, he says, was the boredom. He spent 18 of his 26 months in the medium security federal prison in Danbury, Conn. "It's supposed to be the country club of prisons," he says, "but it's an undeserved reputation. There wren't too many petty rules, but it's incredibly boring--no library, all you can do is watch television, see a movie once a month, or if you're a member of the Mafia you can play bocci...
...some suspense on the altar of comic effect, and as a result, the final revelations lose part of their force. In addition, her emphasis curtails the range of emotions implicit in the script, since characters as different as the cynical Mr. Paravicini and the pathetic would-be architect Christopher Wren emerge in this production as similarly successful comic types. Sometimes laughter intrudes where it shouldn't; for example, Wren's paranoid outburst in the second act ("You're all against me, everyone's always been against me"), is in context far more amusing than pitiable...
...STANDOUTS in a generally fine cast are Davis Goodman as the effeminate Wren and Sam Bloomfield as Mr. Paravicini. Goodman minces marvelously through his role as the child-like homosexual, and Bloomfield, clad in an elegant dinner jacket and bedizened with rings, gives a superbly controlled performance as the uninvited guest. Also good is Mark Howard, appropriately manic as Detective Sergeant Trotter. Nancy Abrams makes a stony-faced Mrs. Boyle, although her carefully accented syllables sound too much like metered poetry...