It Won't Work on Paper

APPARENTLY IF YOU sit long enough at a party with someone you've just met, nodding silently and saying "oh yes" in the right places while they talk, you can make them lose control. An anecdote will run on to become a ramble, a desperate stream of words, and finally a torrential gush of non-sequential gibberish that will make the speaker blush and lunge madly for the nearest door.

Red Cross does not do this, exactly, but it does have a comic sense of what a compulsive monologue is really like. And when actors as lively as these three push these monologues into gleeful expressions of extreme emotion, a graceful slapstick abandon keeps the audience laughing beyond the applause. Each actor found a tone that could inject a shot of the ludicrous into any situtation. Things build until the mere sight of one of them lying immobile on the floor is unbearably funny-- it's that feeling of knowing that whatever comes next will be hilarious, whatever it may be.

Cassandra Warshowsky plays a maid with bright, starstruck eyes, a face fast as quicksilver and an awkward energy that has Liza Minelli written all over it. Donnally Miller's vague and woeful wildman has a strange way of displaying innocent curiosity. He even speaks his lines as if they themselves are a source of wonderment-it's perfect. Laure Solet's performance brings the concept of complaint to its highest reaches, with a successful method that can only be called nervous nonchalance. All in all Sam Shepard's play is so vigorously acted that one's magnanimity cannot help but extend to the entire cast of thousands of crab lice.

***

IHAD JUST diligently conjectured that Red Cross was about how one's imagination can transcend pain if other people are left well out of it when Offending the Audience came on. It proceeded to put to the torch all such thought patterns, and with a Spanish Inquisitor's lack of mercy. This "play" by Peter Handke politely refuses to succumb to comment, criticism or description: I must have composed ten brave little reviews in my head during the production, only to feel each one neatly self-destruct as the play went on. Offending the Audience tears down theatrical illusions you didn't know you had. And except for a language sometimes knotted in the style of R.D. Laing, it does so in an ultirmately constructive way.

Both these plays, which are directed by Donnally Miller, stir up joy and insight in their minor way so naturally from the tenor of the moment and the color of the incident that plot summaries, for example, won't work on paper. It's all pretty weird.