Chuckles Along the Way

I'VE PUT OFF writing this review as long as I could, because I'm not sure how to do it. Moonchildren is as funny a comedy as you are likely to see for some time, and like most good comedies it's also serious and strong. Michael Weller wrote it about the people he shared a house with during his senior year at Brandeis (that was 1964-65), people he compares in a program note to walkers across a desert strewn with unmarked patches of quicksand which they can only avoid by signaling to one another in curious and incomprehensible ways. ("On the other hand," he adds, "it's just this old play with a few technical problems but basically straightforward enough and with some good chuckles along the way.") At the New Theater the play is getting an admirable production, with a cast that may well be uniformly good: Richard Cox (as Bob, the early freak who serves as the play's hero), Carol Williard (Kathy, his girlfriend, who moves out at the end of the second act and comes back for a final conversation after everyone else moves out), and Kenneth McMillan (the fat landlord, who informs the students that their "openness" is going to "save this fucking country" but whose putative benevolence doesn't keep him from keeping their deposit) seem to be best, but this may be just because they have the best parts. John Pasquin directs well, and William F. Matthews' set looks as though Weller's people could inhabit it. The second act has a couple of short dull stretches -- a series of jokes about relevance that don't seem awfully relevant any more, and a brief appearance by Bob's uncle to let Bob know his mother is dying -- and every once in a while the comedy seems not only wry but also thin, as though the play were called not Moonchildren but Charlie Brown Goes to College. But such moments are rare. Surprisingly little of the dialogue, or even the slang, has dated. And the characterizations -- the hostile policemen, the guy who lives downstairs ("I see the cars go by. I see the Fords. The Chevies. The Datsuns. I see the Datsuns. And the odd Cadillac, I don't miss them."), the pair of put-on artists, the bemused graduate student in mathematics who has lived in the house for three months without noticing that it doesn't include a cat and who tries to set himself afire to protest the Indochina war, the preener who wants to get into Kathy, even the flower child who is only into sitting under tables -- these characterizations are as funny and as right as they can ever have been. I think you should see Moonchildren, and I can't imagine anyone's not enjoying it.

THE REASON I put off writing the review is that I think Moonchildren includes an analysis of student life in general, and I was afraid that if I talked about that I might discourage people from going to see it.

A couple of summers ago I had a job as an office boy in New York City. One of the secretaries in the office was a girl putting in time until she got married; the wedding was last June, unless it was called off. She wasn't terribly bright -- someone once told her to go to hell, as I recall, and she came right back with "Why don't you?" evidently convinced it was a crushing, witty, and original remark. And it only dawned on her toward the end of the summer that I probably lived in a dormitory. It was her envy at the discovery that surprised me, though I guess it shouldn't have: On her vacation she was planning a trip with her fiance, with her mother along as a chaperone. It started me thinking.

I was talking with a guy from B&G last year when a pretty girl walked by. "The things I missed when I was young," he said, with what can only be described as a soulful leer. "When I was your age you had to wine and dine a girl for a year before you could get into her. But today! You just take her down to the Square for a hot dog and then back to bed."

Lots of folks think student life is idyllic. The reason the neighbors complain, the landlord reassures the students in Moonchildren, is that they would give their last hair to live like students themselves. In Moonchildren's first act there's an encyclopedia salesman, a young person like the students or the secretary who envied my freedom. "You study math?" he asked the graduate student. "I'd have liked to study math...My father made me study law." When he realizes the students are of both sexes, the encyclopedia salesman's envy soars still higher, but I don't think Weller thinks that's the core of it. To people like the encyclopedia salesman -- constrained by economic necessity to spend much or most of their time doing things they do not enjoy for businesses they neither control nor profit from -- just living away from home, attaining even just the semblance of control over one's own life seems an unimaginable emancipation.

But the students in Moonchildren don't feel emancipated, they feel irrelevant, and in the last act, Weller shows why: After graduation they probably won't even see each other again. Mike, whose tutor says he is a genius in physics, will inherit his father's lumber business. As his girlfriend points out, even if he were to become a professor of physics, in 20 years he would only discover that he was being funded by the CIA. Mike's girlfriend is all set to marry him and be a housewife. "You've changed, you really have changed," Kathy tells her bitterly, but it's not clear that she's found a happier alternative. One of the reasons for the constant stream of jokes that fills the house, Weller makes plain, is its inhabitants' feeling that their studentdom denies them any serious purpose, that the fun will end in a year or two and was never intended to continue.

Robert Frost wrote: "Only where love and need are one, and life is play for mortal stakes, is the deed ever really done for heaven's and the future's sakes." Marx said it would happen only when there are no painters, no landlords, no students, but only people, who among other things paint, keep house and study.

Until that day comes, we can be glad of the grace and wit with which Moonchildren's students enjoy their irrelevance. It would be unwise to assume, I might add, that the cat who doesn't live in the house is not going to turn up.