Off Broadway: Cuckold in a Panic

OFF BROADWAY

Stage humor is in transition. The old humor of the gag and the wise crack was confident, benign, a pick-me-up rather than a putdown. The new humor, which draws its tone from play wrights such as Albee and Pinter, is cruel, taut-nerved, and speaks the lingo of the obscene and the absurd, not funny-ha-ha but funny-peculiar. The new humor reigns in off-Broadway’s Scuba Duba, a flagellatingly funny first play by Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman (Stern, A Mother’s Kisses).

The opening curtain finds Scuba Duba’s hero holding a huge scythe in the middle of a Riviera chateau draw ing room. Harold Wonder (Jerry Orbach) has an albatross complex and a symbolic knife at his throat. While his two children lie asleep upstairs, his wife is out cuckolding him with a Negro skin-diver, or so he thinks. Harold, in a skull-popping panic, half-dials phones, swigs champagne from a bottle, runs to the door with his scythe and roars out bloody maledictions on “the Goddamn spade frogman.” In a performance marvelously sustained at the pitch of brilliance, Jerry Orbach sprays comic vitriol without ever letting the playgoer forget that this man’s heart is in a vise of anguish.

Perhaps a call back to Mom in the New York City Borough of Queens, “where I had defenses,” might help.’ Cold comfort there. “Is that why you called, Harold?” bleats his Yiddisha Mama. “You thought your mother needed a little filth thrown in her face all the way from France?” More cheer is shed by a sexy sylph in a mauve postage-stamp bikini. Miss Janus, delectably played by Brenda Smiley, has a Proust-like remembrance of flings past and an impish vein of insecurity: “I wish I could get to the state where I truly believed my behind was beautiful.”

Throughout the play Friedman lances pet hates with an ardor so indiscriminate as to seem bracingly honest. The air is unfogged by any pious cant about brotherly love as he tongue-twits Jews, Negroes, Babbitts, Frenchmen, Chinese, Yugoslavs, white liberals, black militants, wives, husbands, thieves and psychiatrists. From this last and presumably lowest shelf of humanity, the playwright produces a fatuously brain-shrunk specimen who brings his patient-paramour to the chateau. She in turn treats Manhattan’s theatergoers to the sight of their first topless actress, but it must ungallantly be recorded that the lady’s mammaries are pendulous.

Early and logically Friedman says: “There’s just no right way to be about Negroes.” In Act II, Harold’s wife shows up with two Negroes, the skindiver and the man she really loves, a Brooks Brothers type who recites poetry and cherishes her femininity. Harold is more deeply nonplussed than he was by the notion of his wife’s surrender to a typical minstrel man who is also a switch blade artist and a sexual athlete. Playgoers may be equally nonplussed by the belated stab at seriousness, especially after Friedman’s nightlong skill at making race a laughing matter.