The Theatregoer Rats and The Indian Wants the Bronx

at the Charles Playhouse

RATS and The Indian Wants the Bronx are not plays, but rather scenes by Israel Horovitz which opened at the Charles Playhouse this past Thursday. Neither of the offerings has the force and wit (or even obscenity and music) of Horovitz's later play, Morning -part of the trilogy Morning, Noon, and Night -which had its New England premiere at the Loeb last fall. It is apparent that Horovitz knows how to write at least the beginnings and ends of plays, but the middles fall through. In Rats, the evening's opener, two rats discuss their backgrounds and childhoods in an oversized nursery. In The Indian, (Eastern, not American) Wants the Bronx, two 1950-vintage JD's decide to beat up on an Indian. The endings invariably contain a startling twist, but those middles lope from one half-achieved punchline to the next in an attempt to give substance to what is basically situation comedy or tragedy. In a sense Horovitz may be writing plays backwards. Instead of prefabricating beginning, middle, and end for the actors, he ought to let them improvise on his situations, go over the routines and situations many times, and then retain in a fixed play whatever worked out best. They were kept from getting truly involved in the play because the situations were difficult to overcome and the ending a tremendous millstone (albeit funny) around the plot's neck.

Rats, for example, takes us to an oversized nursery in a Harlem tenement. Jebbie, "a fat Harlem rat," sits counting his money amidst a six-foot-high crib and ten-foot baby chair. It is quite possible that a metaphor of a man as a rat in the nursery of the universe was implied, but Horovitz did not choose to develop the play in that direction. Bobby is a hung-up Greenwich, Connecticut rat. Jebbie exclaims, "I gotta tell you kid, I'm hip to your problems (Greenwich and all that) because I get calls from two-hundred little madras-commuting-blond-Nazi-God-bless-America mice like you every week. I pulled my ass up from New Jersey. That's right. New Jersey. Not Newark either so don't get any smart ideas." Then follow jokes about Montclair, paranoia, penis-envy. On one hand, it must be cunning to hear rats talk this way in an over-sized nursery. On the other, the lines exploit the old convention of laughing at the words "elephant," "banana," "belly dancer" and "Beverly Hills-men-tality."

Finally, Jebbie begins to wax dramatic about the smell of death (carbon bisulfide). At that moment, something incredible happens: what appears to be a ten-foot-high black baby wakes up screaming in her crib. Actually she is Carolyn Y. Cardwell, from Robert Downey's Putney Swope, and probably is no more than five and a half feet tall. Bobby wants to eat her and Jebbie does not. The baby then screams, "Rats! rats! rats!" and the lights black out (except the cue was missed on Thursday). Jebbie is left weeping and asking "Why?" If the rats are simply anthropomorphic rats, I feel sorry for the baby. If they represent the rich businessmen and hookers who are all killing Harlem, then I feel sorry for the play because it never capitalized on these bitter, vehement themes and chose to remain with some TV vintage humor. Finally, the play lost its sense of proportion since the final result was the sheer shock of seeing this big baby and nothing else, not even "relevance."

Jack Kehoe as Jebbie and Andrew Winner as Bobby were sufficiently rat-like to cause giggles in the audience, but were hesitant in delivering their lines. As a result, the jokes degenerated into patter. Al Pacino's direction should have given the play a big kick on its rump to speed it up, but remained restrained.

INDIAN, the better play, was also better cast. Its New York run drew Horovitz great critical attention and a popular following. Lazaro Perez gave a very nearly touching performance as Joey, a JD-with-a-conscience who has been seduced, it comes out, by his friend Murph's mother. Michael Heit as Murph was more a Beach Boy than a tough Irish kid. Michael Hadge, the patient, Gandhi-like Indian, was eloquent in delivering his gibberish Indian talk but not quite as mysterious as we could wish for. The setting was again New York City, a Fifth Avenue bus stop this time.

The play opens endearingly with the two street kids grooving to a song called, "I walk the lonely streets at night/ A-looking' for your door." Murph and Joey discover the Indian mutely waiting for a bus. The kids wonder if he is an Indian or Turk and go through a series of delightful digs at each other, horseplay, and anecdotes such as the time Murph pulled down his trousers, sat on a Xerox machine, and sent the copies to his friends as Christmas cards. However, neither Heit nor Lazaro really got wound up in the roles. Horovitz is striving for authenticity if nothing else, but created a half-completed parable. Predictably, the horseplay turns malicious, the Indian becomes the victim, and Joey, in Murph's absence, pours his heart out to the mute Indian. As in Rats, perhaps we are all street kids on the street of life, pouring our hearts out to the uncomprehending ears of the universe. Or perhaps the Indian is the mute, uncomprehending audience, oblivious to the threats around it.

This time Horovitz came down hard on these themes. The boys discover the Indian's identification card and torture him with the possibility of calling his home. Joey is torn between sticking with his buddy Murph or saving the Indian from this cruelty. However, the conflict of this kind must be subtle, but is no more subtle than anything else in the play. The play occasionally smacked of the "East Side Gang," the only difference being its slight political edge.

Joey chooses to side with Murph and pins down the Indian as Murph calls his son. The Indian is put on the phone, but to no avail, since Murph has cut the cord and stabbed his hand. The Indian is left reciting "Thank you," the only English words he knows, a receiver in one hand, a wound in the other. This time the play is much more to the point, a grotesque reminder that it is no more grotesque than what it documents. Why guerrilla theatre if it already happens on the streets?

Once more, however, Horovitz has written a scene and not a play. The issue are never transferred from the situation to the ????. Perhaps six or seven of Horovitz's plays should be ??ked together, cut down for time considerations, and shaped into one major work. Each of these single punches could then add up to a fight. As they are now, Rats and Indian are uneasy testaments to a pity still one step removed from true sorrow and understanding, filling in the gaps with frenetic humor.