Date: Fri 06-Dec-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: DONNAM

Illustration: C

Location: A14

Quick Words:

Brown-Long-Wharf-theatre-Show

Full Text:

(rev "The Show-Off" @Long Wharf, 12/6/96)

Theatre Review-

Brown Refrains From Showing Off With His Long Wharf Swan Song

(with cut)

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN - Retiring after a 30-year reign as artistic director of New Haven's

Long Wharf Theater, Arvin Brown has chosen for his swan song a revival of one

of the 1920's period pieces he understands well: George Kelly's The Show-Off .

Co-starring Brown's wife, Joyce Ebert, and featuring a cast of Long Wharf

regulars, the play is at once a nostalgic evocation of middle-American

domesticity and a wry portrait of changing times - when technology was about

to alter irrevocably both the landscape and the economy, polluting the air

with gasoline fumes while offering fantastic opportunities to those with the

vision to recognize new possibilities.

The Fishers are a typical American family: sensible, responsible Philadelphia

homeowners who know their place in the world and are comfortable with it. Mr

Fisher plods off to his factory job, lunch pail in hand, and returns home in

the evening to read his paper in peace, while Mrs Fisher (Ebert) fusses over

the household.

Older daughter Clara has made a successful, if loveless, marriage to a

prosperous business man. Younger daughter Amy works as a bookkeeper, and

20-year old Joe putters in the basement, building wireless radios and working

on a secret design for an anti-rust treatment.

Tim Choate is Aubrey Piper, the play's title character and catalyst for the

plot. Piper is a $32-a-week clerk with pretensions to higher status, who

spends the first act persistently courting Amy, much to the dismay of her

family, who cannot abide his compulsive bragging and phony posturing.

Once Amy marries him she must suffer the consequences, as Aubrey indulges his

champagne tastes while scrounging from his brother-in-law to pay the rent.

Things come to a head when Aubrey manages to wreck a borrowed automobile and

run over a traffic cop while driving without a license, just as Mr Fisher dies

of a sudden stroke, raising the conflict between the sturdy, no-nonsense Mrs

Fisher and her unreliable son-in-law to a new level of intensity.

This play is not a comedy, although it follows the format of a TV sitcom and

Choate's Aubrey is gratingly obnoxious along the lines of Jim Carrey's Cable

Guy, or Bill Murray in What About Bob? His mannerisms are insufferable. But

while exaggerated, they are all too familiar.

Unlike his in-laws, Aubrey is a man who recognizes the potential of the

changing world; he just doesn't know how to grab hold of it, any more than he

can control the automobile he aspires to drive. He is a buffoon, but he is

also a foreshadowing of the modern industrial magnates who would rise to power

on the strength of technological miracles born in some tinkerer's basement.

Julia Gibson is properly foolish as the petulant flapper Amy, and Ann

McDonough combines annoyance with grudging sympathy as her wiser sister.

Stephen Barker Turner is sound and sensible as brother Joe, who has a good

head on his shoulders and knows it, and Joel Stedman does an interesting job

as Clara's husband Frank.

As is usual at Long Wharf, Michael Yeargan's set design is brilliant, and

everyone involved does their best.

Over the years Arvin Brown has directed a great many plays like this one, a

number of which might have been more appealing and impressive works with which

to end a career, but he certainly won't be judged by The Show-Off alone.

The final production of 1996, The Show-Off continues through December 22.

Contact Long Wharf's box office, located with the theatre at 222 Sargeant

Drive in New Haven, at 787-4282 for curtains and tickets.