Sligar and Son

NOW I HAVE nothing against the word "fuck" per se. But when a playwright uses it as often as I blink my eyes, I expect him to provide some of the excitement this word suggests. In Sligar and Son, author Andy Hoye fires away with enough expletives for five LeRoi Jones one-acters, yet the four-letter word that most aptly describes his play is "dull."

Sligar and Son has the air, at least, of being a drama of contemporary racial strife. The setting is a ghetto grocery store in pre-riot Newark. The characters refer to black people as "blacks" and white people as "honkies." Still, I have my doubts as to whether Hoye actually knows any more about the ghetto than Spiro Agnew. His one-act play is not about black power or slum despair or even law and order as much as he would like us to believe it is. Rather, it is the story of a simple white bigot whose son rejects him and then sets out to destroy him.

Even within the context of its elementary substance (which, I'd say, even Stanley Kramer would find old hat), Sligar and Son fails to come off. The plot, flatly melodramatic at best, usually seems contrived and often collapses under the strain of its distortions of reality.

The physical scene of this one-acter shows this lack of expertise at its fullest. Paul, the son, and three of his black friends are robbing Ed, the father, at his safe. While Paul has explained in the scene before that his father will surely open his safe and count his money at three in the morning, it's hard to believe that even super-capitalist Ed would actually get out of bed to do this. During the robbery attempt, as one of the boys tries to smash Ed on the back of the head with a bottle, the victim pulls out a gun and fires it into the air. This quick thinking seems a bit too quick, for my money. The three black boys then run out, and, just as Paul gets to the door to escape, a cop enters. Now how could this cop walk in at precisely that moment and fail to grab or shoot at (since this is a liberal play where cops should shoot rashly) any of the other culprits who just streamed out into the street? Don't ask me; I'm just calling it as I saw it.

As if all this didn't render the whole scene ludicrous, Hoye tops it off with one of the great near sneak plays of our time. The cop tells the father that Paul was one of the assailants, but pop is indignant, defending his son to the death. My son was chasing after them, he says, trying to protect my money. No, the cop says, your son is a crook. Pop immediately changes his mind and turns on his son and tries to kill him. In other words, Pop goes from love to hate in thirty seconds. Almost, but not quite, Mr. Hoye. In five minutes you might have done it.

FOUR-LETTER WORDS aside, the dialogue of Sligar stretches the imagination almost as much as the plot construction. The lines range from pure exposition to the hokey (Father, speaking of the son: "He called me old man!") to the absurd ("I don't know where you're headed, but you're going to be pushed there damn fast."). Some of the worst writing centers around Paul's teenage affair, gratuitously stuck into the second half--complete with flashback.

As you might guess, directing Sligar and Son is not of the most enviable jobs on God's Earth. Still, Chris Sorensen could have done more to soften the blows the plawright's pen have wrought. With a heavy-handed script, heavy-handed performances aren't exactly the order of the day, yet that is primarily what we get from the largely freshman cast. Typical is Glenn Schewtz as the gum-chewing father. He has a strange way with a line, and Sorensen might have tried to correct the problem. Schewtz starts off slow and loud, then becomes fast and loud like a locomotive. As a result, I often had trouble hearing the end of the elder Sligar's sentences.

Sorensen doeen't have much luck with the staging either. After the painfully clear exposition of the robbery in the script, it's pointless to accent the obvious by having two scenes close with Paul malevolently eyeing the safe.

Perhaps Sligar and Son wouldn't seem so bad, if it didn't try to pass itself off as a slice of ghetto life, circa 1967. But this is what it does, from the language to Debbie Waroff's fine naturalistic set. Not for a moment does the playwright convince us that he knows what he is talking about. (Hardly does the play begin when he shows us a hippie reading that revolutionary tract Black Like Me.) The playwright who wanted so much to give his work the sound of Stokely Carmichael gave us the sound of a foul-mouthed Edward Brooke instead.