The Knack

The Theatre Company of Boston is currently demonstrating why Ann Jellicoe's The Knack has never before been performed in America: not even fine performances from all four of the actors involved save this dull comedy.

The play is a prolonged joke on the theme of seduction. Tolen, a full-time girl chaser who "just isn't satisfied unless he has had it for five hours a day," shares a house with Colin, a bumbling schoolteacher who is desperate for sexual experience, and Tom, an imp whose chief delight lies in tormenting the other two.

Into this household comes Nancy, an innocent country lass who's looking for the YWCA. Tolen tells Colin that he will "show how it's done" by seducing her immediately. His attempts are frustrated first by Tom's antics, and then by Colin, who desperately wants to "make her myself." Eventually, of course, he does.

This is an awfully thin plot for a two-hour play, and Miss Jellicoe doesn't help her play any by making her characters so one-dimensional. Each has one characterizing action--which he repeats to distraction. Tolen, every time he sees a girl passing on the street, jumps out the window to pursue her. Colin, when confronted with anything female, cringes in terror. And Tom talks and acts crazily, but at least he finds more than one way to be mad. There's only one way a man can jump out a window, and the act tends to pall about the third time.

At the beginning of the play, these three characters are left alone on the stage for thirty-five minutes of almost unrelieved tedium. When Nancy arrives, at the end of the first act, the play livens up a bit. Where the others have just one mode of expression, she has three--she giggles, she sighs, and she snorts like a pig. This takes about fifteen minutes to pall completely. In the last act she loses a third of her effectiveness by not snorting any more.

Miss Jellicoe is apparently a great believer in the use of seemingly irrelevant gimmicks to "reinforce the total impact of the play," as she tells us in a program note. Each character's entrance, for example, is heralded by a flurry of background music, which eventually takes on Symbolic Meaning. When the tenor saxophone which originally played for Tolen begins to announce Colin's arrival late in act two, it means that he's been transformed, I suppose. In the tiny Hotel Bostonian theatre, where no seat is more than twenty-five feet from the stage, the music is merely distracting.

It's a shame that four fine performances had to be wasted on such a play. Marilyn Chris is delightfully bouncy as Nancy, but there's only so much she can do with her lines. Alex Wipf, as Tolen, jumps out of windows neatly, and Alex Canaan is competent as the bumbling schoolteacher.

Paul Price, as Tom, has the best role, and steals the play's few exciting scenes. He is terribly funny when he frustrates Tolen by taking apart the bed in which he hoped to seduce Nancy, and hilarious in demonstrating "how to tame a lion" with Nancy in the feline role. Hopefully, the theatre company will keep him on hand until they find a better play for him.