Clowning Around

WHEN MURRAY BURNS shambles down Park Avenue at dawn, hat jauntily back and screeching at the blank buildings something like "Okay, rich people, there's volleyball down here at nine o'clock sharp--come on, let's snap it up!" he is irresistible. In Leverett House's A Thousand Clowns moment like these win out against some pretty heavy odds.

Murray, TV writer turned social misfit and lovable bum, lives with a nephew over whom he has no legal claim--a "middle-aged kid" named Nick. Murray loves kids, and kids love him, presumably because he has a kid's-eye-view of conformity and hypocrisy in adults. When the nasty, unfeeling social workers try to separate him from his twelve-year-old prodigy you have a play. Murray lives out one long and harmless fantasy of spontaneity and irreverence--everybody's fantasy of telling the straights where to go. None of the other characters in the drama can try to "straighten him out" (and in a certain way he needs it) without envying him and somehow loving him.

The audience feels this, too, but there is something uneasy, something dishonest in Herb Gardner's original Broadway comedy. The fact is that Murray, however appealing, is disgusted with the very world that creates the play: his snide, wise-guy humor and his rah-rah sense of fun sit smugly in the hackneyed phrases and conditioned attitudes of the Madison Avenue mentality he scorns. This is hardly getting down to the roots of self-honesty. When a sentimental and moralizing tone begins to rear its nasty little head near the end, the message, which is fairly muddled anyway, becomes downright offensive.

BUT, AFTER ALL, A Thousand Clowns is one disarmingly funny line after another. And Leverett House's production by making it clear that it really doesn't want to pull any fast ones, mounts a refreshing enough show to offset most of the play's own inconsistencies. The lack of professionalism is unabashed: it saves this play by legitimizing the fun. The audience that gave a standing ovation last Friday night was not looking for perfection, but for a good time.

The ramshackle stage is enough to erase any slick overtones from the beginning, and here it is used to the best advantage by Dave Fuller's manic sets. Murray's apartment has the disarray of a closet overflowing with athletic equipment. The occupant of this holocaust is played by Bill Schley, who coaxed his Murray from a slow start into a performance of unassuming ease: this is fitting in a character that can tend to brash self-righteousness. Walter Murphy, a fifteen-year-old from an acting program at Phillips Brooks House, plays Nick (who, at Murray's urging, calls himself everything from Dr. Morris Fishbein to Raphael Sabatini) as he should be--bright, engaging, and a little bit bizarre.

THE OTHER FOUR CHARACTERS are just as assured. Susan Ehrlich's Sandra is an appropriate mixture of the fun-loving and the affably neurotic; Joe Mobilia's Arnold--the social worker with his heart in his glasses--is perfect; and David Goldbloom, as Leo Herman, plays what amounts to a certifiable chipmunk with energy and a brilliant voice. Ira Fink's picture of Murray's brother bears an uncanny resemblance to Dick Van Dyke, and is probably better at hamming it up.

The Leverett House Arts Society, which earlier sponsored a joyful, slapdash version of "The Threepenny Opera" seems to want above all to have the kind of good time that can be shared with an audience.