Theater: Punch & Judy Revisited

The Owl and the Pussycat, by Bill Manhoff. A verbal slugfest between a man and a woman is the contemporary form of the mating dance. The man may not want to go to bed with the girl, as the hero of this play doesn’t, but he realizes that it may be the only way to get her to shut up. Pussycat is as old as the Punch-and-Judy show and as new as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and the evening is filled with good, healthy, vulgar, neurotic laughter.

The pussycat (Diana Sands) is a hellcat, a down-to-dirt prostitute with a tongue of brass. The owl (Alan Alda) is more of a penguin with a hotfoot, a bookstore clerk whose bookish dignity is destined to be bruised beyond repair. As figments of their own imaginations, they conceive of themselves, respectively, as a model and a writer.

With the loneliness of a long-distance voyeur, Alda has been spying on Sands’s pay-and-playtimes through binoculars. His priggish rectitude makes him inform her landlord. Thrown out of her apartment (the setting is San Francisco), she storms into his. After that, they fight, kiss, fight, split up, fight, make up, and fight. The stage, like the plot, might seem bare except that each lover introduces the other to a secret love. He is seduced by his body, she is ravished by her mind. Act III is devoted to a hilarious suicide pact in which despair gets bogged down in logistics.

Anything short of tiptop performances might have been the ruination of the play. Diana Sands is a fiery, sexy shrew who puts plenty of lip on her English. Arms akimbo and eyes aglaze, Alan Alda flaps haplessly after every disaster like a commuter ignored at a bus stop. Director Arthur Storch keeps Pussycat yowling along, and if Playwright Manhoff does some comic counterfeiting, he also mints plenty of sound money lines (“I happen to be an intellectual. That means that I am not at the mercy of what I want to do.”).

Since much of the laughter excited by Pussycat is cruel, put-down humor, the why of its comic impact is almost more interesting than the how of it. Nobody much believes in love any more; Broadway has not seen an old-fashioned nonmusical love story in years. This is intimately linked to the image of the modern woman, who does not seem real, at least onstage, unless she can spar, jaw-to-jaw and eyeball-to-eyeball, with her man. As Ibsen would have been the first to recognize, Nora competes at home nowadays, and the doll’s house is a boxing ring. It is this laughter of inner recognition that greets Pussycat. All truly modern love stories end in just one way: “They scrapped happily ever after.”