Lysistrata

A flock of women, not enjoying their husbands frequently, decide they must change the situation. Lysistrata tells them not to enjoy their husbands at all. Her strategy doesn't spring from any nunnish credo. After all, she's the one who demands rhetorically, What do women want? They want to get laid. And she, favoring the practice, plans to make it possible every night. A few hard days of chastity and the men will be so worn out that, in order to go to bed, they'll scream for the peace their women ask for with stony faces. Then everybody will be able to make love instead of war.

Aristophanes worships the risque; his play is loaded with the kind of jokes you imagine Avatar fiends or prep school boys tell each other. Any innocent mention of rising, the playwright apparently believes, deserves a comeback with the wickedest innuendoes.

A show consisting of filthy one-liners has to have a certain finesse. That, unfortunately, is what Deborah Waroff's production lacks. Funny bits often get lost in a shuffle onstage. Actors push less funny ones with the assiduity of your old grandmother--who forced you to swallow fifty of her worst cupcakes at one tea party. And Miss Waroff's blocking did nothing to vary the continual re-introduction of a familiar joke. In a scene between Myrrhine, who is upholding chastity regulations, and Kinesias, her husband, the lady breaks off caresses and runs away for little extras--a bed, a coverlet, a pillow, perfume--that she insists they have before lying down. Each new errand should bring a laugh--except that Carla Barringer (Myrrhine) exits the same way each time.

Another misconception about what's amusing shows in the interpretation of Lysistrata. Marty Ritter plays a little dynamo instead of an elegant, slightly aloof character. So lines like, "there's something about women's temperaments that makes me hate them," come out as expostulations instead of slightly wistful asides. Lysistrata isn't an organization woman: her eyes are set on distant heavens full of available males. In fact, she can hardly wait to be dominated again. Miss Ritter behaves too much like Susan B. Anthony to convey the real dream.

The other actors rely on cracked voices, dropped jaws and spears in erection for comedy. Robert Harlow's set, a conglomeration blue skies and cardboard columns, was sloppily executed. Not a flamboyant production.