TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031692/0316410.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.9 KB | 89 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 66

Two Who Are On Their Way


Plays by Howard Korder and Jon Robin Baitz acidly etch how we
live now

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III


    When a writer for the stage reveals great promise but has
not yet produced fully satisfying work, old hands are apt to
remark, "I'm not sure there's a play here, but there's certainly
a playwright." Just such tempered optimism is being triggered
right now by two emotionally intense, fiercely funny and sadly
flawed works by dramatists in their early 30s. One writer --
Howard Korder -- has the slam-bang dialogue and macho
preoccupations of a David Mamet in training. The other -- Jon
Robin Baitz -- can infuse domestic drama with the burdens of
history in the fashion of a budding Arthur Miller. But neither
can yet write two cumulative and cohesive acts. In each of their
current offerings, one act sings, the other doesn't.

    Korder first showed talent with 1987's Fun, a teenage
boy's nihilist spree, and burst into prominence in 1988 with
Boys' Life, a Mametian glimpse of post adolescent rituals of
drinking, puking, courting and infidelity. In Search and
Destroy, now on Broadway, he looks at men his own age who have
achieved material success but feel an inner hollowness. They
seek cures ranging from ritual maleness a la Iron John to
shedding their ties and common sense in reckless crusades for
adventure. The central character, played by film actor Griffin
Dunne, reacts to a busted marriage and a Florida income tax
problem by turning to a trio of cliche bad ass pursuits:
cross-country wandering (the show's sole set is a highway),
crime (involving, naturally, suitcases of white powder) and
moviemaking. Of these, Korder presents the cinema as the most
corrupt; it takes an impromptu murder to get the antihero really
launched as a mogul.

    The action is episodic, and most characters are fleeting,
placing more stress on Dunne's performance than his lightweight,
ingratiating style can bear. The first act is expository and
lamely comic, acutely lacking the menace and madness that make
the second act crackle. Sometimes the play is a chilling
rumination on '80s greed. Sometimes it's merely upper Miami
Vice. In either vein, it is supremely cynical. Korder asserts
with equal force that run-amuck individualism is appalling and
that it is the one sure path to triumph.

    Baitz came to notice in Los Angeles in 1987 and
off-Broadway the next year with The Film Society, a story of a
failed teacher in South Africa, where the writer spent much of
his youth. His latest effort, The Substance of Fire, is at
Lincoln Center after a sold-out run at the smaller Playwrights
Horizons. Structurally, the problems are the opposite of the
Korder play's. The first half, about a family dispute over a
publishing empire, surges with believable life. The second half,
about the clan's Holocaust-scarred patriarch, clanks with
calculation.

    The pieces fit logically. Three yuppie ish children who
ungratefully depose their father in the interest of fiscal
stability are stand-ins for the whole indulged baby-boom
generation. The burnt-out father, who obsesses about the past
and about a supposed universal abandonment of standards,
epitomizes a dying elitist culture. But while the children
emerge with convincing particularity, all Ron Rifkin's fiery
righteousness and icy brilliance cannot make plausible the
contrived second act, which centers on the father's buying and
burning an original painting by Hitler.

    Neither play is memorable, although Korder's might make a
lively movie. But each is an exciting signpost toward the
emergence of a major voice. And unlike the upcoming Broadway
nostalgia of such veterans as Neil Simon, Herb Gardner and
August Wilson, each is piercingly focused on the world we live
in today.