Theater: Cartesian Dentist

Cactus Flower. Humor is often the puckish shadow cast by national character. English comedy is a running display of oneupmanship, reflecting an indelible class system. The Teutonic cast-ironies of Brecht seem manufactured by Krupp. The classic American comic event is the chase, a drolly tangible version of the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream. And the French sex farce is logic run rampant, reason carried to an unreasonable and absurd extremity. That is why French sex farces are innately sexless: Descartes wrote them all. They begin with cogito ergo sum, and they rely not on seduction but sophistry, not on rolled-down beds but revved-up minds, not on fervid matings but frenetic misunderstandings.

Cactus Flower is such a French farce, seasoned to U.S. tastes with local situation gags by Adapter-Director Abe Burrows, garnished with appealing humanity, and served with unerring timing by a well-chosen cast. Lauren Bacall plays a dentist’s nurse who looks “like a big white Band-Aid,” speaks with an antiseptic voice that would intimidate gangrene, and lives a prim life with mother. The dentist (Barry Nelson) holds a master’s degree in bachelorhood, and while he appreciates spinsterish efficiency in the office, he turns for amour to a Greenwich Village post-adolescent (Brenda Vaccaro). This child wants to be a bride, but the dentist has lied to her that he has a wife and three children. In distress, the girl turns on the gas oven, and the suicide attempt, foiled by a friendly neighbor (Burt Brincker-hoff), convinces the dentist that he has been hit by a depth charge of love.

He proposes, but his concerned young mistress wants to meet the wife and see if divorce will agree with her. Grudgingly, Bacall agrees to the role and the ruse. Nelson butters the lie by telling his bride-to-be that his wife has a boy friend whom she wishes to marry. This makes Vaccaro extravagantly solicitous: she must meet Bacall’s supposed lover and see if he is a good sort. By the time the fictional couples are locked on a discotheque floor in the steely bonds of subterfuge, Cactus Flower is a prickly web of deceit. Inevitably, Bacall kicks over the old-maidenly traces and turns into a bewitching torso-twisting temptress, while the dentist drops his dentures.

As a vastly accomplished jokesmith, Abe Burrows is up against tough and lonely competition—himself—and there are some cavities in his comic lines. But the cast fills them handsomely. Besides looking good, Lauren Bacall handles dialogue like a bone-dry martini. Barry Nelson’s whole being winces with boyish mock innocence, and Brenda Vaccaro’s characterization draws royal flushes from mental blanks.

Cactus Flower is beguiling rather than robust. It skips a comic beat now and again, but it is watch-proof, an amusing way of forgetting time and not merely killing it.