Towards a Comedy of Lost Possibilities

Twigs, George Furth's new comedy now in pre-Broadway tryouts at the Wilbur, is as unassuming as its title would suggest. It sets forth a series of little mishaps, a quartet of marriages that have, however slightly, gone awry. Its characters are middle age and middle class. But in intention and effect the play itself is something more than middlebrow.

Where Company--whose award-winning book was also written by Mr. Furth--dissected a series of Manhatten marriages with the coolness of stainless steel. Twigs looks at a corresponding sampling of suburban couples with the compassion of a family retainer. As the program counsels, "The play takes place in a variety of kitchens, on the outskirts of a major city, on the day before Thanksgiving." Not Thanksgiving itself, mind you, but the very day before. Furth's playlets approach individual resolutions only to resolutely back away. Although there is a stability in Peter Larkin's sets--the four kitchens themselves are best seen as variations on a single theme--underneath it all the answers are just as tentative and tenuous as in the crazily mobile world of Company.

Consider then Act I: It's nine o'clock in the morning as Emily (played by Sada Thompson, who'll also assume the other three female roles as the play progresses) moves into her new, four-room apartment with the aid of Frank, her mover (Nicholas Coster). Emily has lost her husband. A widow then? Frank asks. "Well, I don't mean I lost him on the street," she quickly answers. I am, myself, divorced, Frank hastens to explain. And with that the two enter into a conspiracy to fill each other in on the details of their lives before their work is done and they are forced to say goodbye. Emily might be a bit too tense and a little too officious, but before Frank has to leave he's agreed to return the following day for Thanksgiving dinner. It's the merest vignette of a "drama." Little is ventured, though something is gained.

Act II ups the ante. The scene is now the neo-Honeymooners apartment of Celia and her husband Phil (Simon Oakland), a retired master sargeant. Swede (Conrad Bain), an old army buddy, has just arrived and the two men are up to their elbows in cans of beer and talk of the army, the fights and other things that generally just aren't what they once used to be. Celia, a childless, tired woman, her hair--as described by her own mother--a gaudy "change-of-life red," tries to force the conversation to include herself. She gossips about the neighbors, laments the marriage of the parish priest, tells of her failed attempt to break into the movies, in desperation reveals the details of two previous nervous breakdowns. She then goes through her old dance routine ("Hollywood and Vine" is the name of the song) to her husband's embarrassed outrage ("If you can't act civilized, go somewhere else"). The curtain falls as Celia so bs silently and the two men ignore her in talk of Mickey Mantle's bleeding legs.

Act III sets out to even the balance. To look at Dorothy and Lou (A. Larry Haines) you'd swear they were a happily married couple (though perhaps a little dull) secure in the comfort of their sleakly cozy, big suburban home. Well then, look again. It's their twenty-fifth anniversary (which Dorothy superstitiously refuses to celebrate) and when questioned on his fidelity Lou suddenly admits to having in the past had two affairs. Two! I've also had two, Dorothy bluffs (or does she?). And the two return to each other's arms only by dropping the issue altogether.

Finally--and by this time, we've realized the three women are three sisters--Ma is introduced. She's a tough old lady. As much of a talker and as big a pain in the ass as any-of her daughters, as Pa (Robert Donley) himself points out. You're a wrinkled old bastard, she replies in the crisscross of invective that bind the two together. And Furth has made his point. Each of the women is her mother's daughter ("Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined," to quote Pope on the matter) and each has won success from life to the extent to which she has found a man willing to endure her weaknesses. Or strengths, as they may be.

Even though Twigs ends on a note of high comedy (for Furth has arranged his acts so that their verbal and visual humor overtakes their early bleakness, a ploy more justifiable dramatically than thematically), it leaves behind an echo of resignation that has just barely escaped despair. None of the daughters is quite the equal of the mother, although each is herself somehow tough enough to accept the increasingly limited possibilities life offers. But then, as Emily says. "If life were perfect, we wouldn't have to go through it."

Perhaps it's only a sign of encroaching age, but it's tone of voice I find myself forced to respect and, I'm afraid, even admire. It's an attitude that's also common to Furth's collaboration with Stephen Sondheim in Company and Sondheim's collaboration with James Goldman in Follies as well as in certain passages of Neil Simon's latest work. (Without being lit crit about it all. I even find something in these plays, call it perhaps an aura of faded expectation, that reminds me of the heroes and heroincs one finds in the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James.) To grasp for a descriptive phrase. Furth seems to be in the process of fashioning a comedy of lost possibilities. Twigs--as it plays the lives of its three sisters off against one another--could almost take for a second epigraph the words sung by Benjamin Stone, the success-failure of Follies:

You're either a poet, or you're a lover, or

You're the famous Benjamin Stone.

You take one road.

You try one door.

There isn't time for any more.

One's life consists of either-or.

The road you didn't take

Hardly comes to mind. Does it?

The door you didn't try

Where would it have led?

Twigs considers a handful of the alternatives, and its answers lie not so much in the rather simple-minded determinism of its title but in the resonance which each act creates in that which succeeds it.

There is a wealth of low-key truths lurking in Furth's play--for here, unlike in a Simon comedy, you don't see the gags being cranked out and tossed at you; the revelations instead seem to slip out as if by mistake--which Sada Thompson manages beautifully. Her characterizations are triumphs of inflection. You never for a minute doubt that her women are all relatives under the skin, yet there is never any danger of the four characters melting into one. All the men involved--particularly Oakland, Bain and Haines--approach their roles with a similar respect for the tribulations of the middle class, although in the case of Coster the results are possibly too casual to force the latecomers to hurry to their seats.

Michael Bennet--who's here making the leap from choreographer to director--has had the courage to let Furth's text speak for itself. In one or two cases, he shows he has the ability deftly to pull off an elaborate visual joke, but mostly he simply allows his actors to sit and talk, a jarringly natural kind of talk that can be rivetting in its lack of pretense. Furth does manage to slip in one or two aphorisms, but generally he wisely settles for just those chuckles of recognition this cast is skilled at eliciting.

I guess then I've backed myself into a rave. A curious position, indeed, since Furth's object is so designedly a minor one. Twigs should prosper from its two weeks here in Boston--for, at present, it's not without moments that are almost too transparently simple as well as two scenes (I and III) a trifle underdeveloped. But then Twigs asks so little from life, what it accomplishes it ends up accomplishing in a very big sort of way.

Mea Culpa Dept: In Saturday's review of Black Comedy, I incorrectly suggested that its author, Peter Shaffer, could also claim title to Slouth, I was wrong. Slouth was written by Anthony Shaffer, Peter's twin brother I am told. But then you know those Britishers, they all do sound alike.