Bad Trip

THERE'S AN OLD TRICK in English literature; I don't know if it has a name, but generally it's an overused gimmick that's been done well a couple of times. Boccacio first used this trick in the Decameron, upon which Chaucer modeled Canterbury Tales. The idea is to get some people together in a place where they will reveal themselves through some telling story or action. Usually a new perspective breathes life into this old hack's trick. But in Philadelphia, Anyone? the perspective seems almost as old as its technique.

The play traps its four characters on a Greyhound bus. and each character is leaving behind a forgettable past, while moving toward some future just as bleak. This kind of atmosphere doesn't exactly lend itself to dramatic action; the play is more a series of monologues spliced onto each other with cement of dubious quality (one character rambles on, then concludes with a key word that the next character picks up on).

Joan Bonato seems to have written Philadelphia for actors to show off their talents, and at times they do. Lois Shelton as Louise, a black woman deserted by her alcoholic husband, knows how to express her bitterness with a good amount of bile. And her lines--especially about taking a black stable-boy statue from the white home where she's going to do the cleaning and lynching it--bring together a good mixture of humor and sorrow. Somehow this play is made for the down-and-outers of the raw, physical side of life, because aside from the black woman and Fran (Valerie Kiuelson), an alcoholic singer on her way to an appointment with the Monongahela River, the play doesn't do too well. The poet (John Sviolka) and the old lady (Ellen Brenner) seem worried about problem--sex and death--that the one-act play just can't fully explore. The bus driver (Leo Pierre Roy) is indistinguishable from his old crate; he's just a vehicle for the play, and his last line sums it all up neatly: "Watch your step as you're going DOWN."

The problem is most people don't watch their step when they're going down, they just fall or jump. It is the playwright's job to watch, and to watch carefully, to capture the fall precisely, and perhaps less naively than with a perspective like the bus driver's--a man who dreams of polkas and beer, and can't understand a woman with no more songs to sing.