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'Social' Complacency
| Article
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11214 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
588 Words |
| Author
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Jeff Church
Jeff Church is a playwright-in-residence at The John F.
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Programs for Children
and Youth. |
Mike Nichols' new comedy, Social Security, is a good-spirited piece about a New York couple who have lost themselves in their own world (art) and have forgotten they have a kook of a mother they've left in the hands of neurotic in-laws. The neurotic in-laws have a daughter who has gone on a sex craze while away at college and therefore want the New York couple to house the zany mom who is evidently not senile, just demanding to the point of dementia. ("I understand those people who go to the garage to get a hatchet…")
So Mom comes, and the New York couple try to get on with their lives. ("What am I gonna do? Chloroform her?") She refuses to get dressed for a dinner party--she gets undressed--therein follows several sight gags. A stimulus in the form of a noted Jewish artist arrives and mom goes through a Pygmalion kind of change. The play ends as the New York couple embrace and dance.
Marlo Thomas and Ron Silver play the upwardly mobile couple, both having been directed before by the King Midas of the theater world. One of Nichols' previous productions, The Real Thing, also featured a literate, contemporary couple--but they had a little conflict in their relationship. Barbara and David (Marlo and Ron) have little to none and bring no life-levels of complexity to the stage, even for comedy. The most we can do is appreciate their taste in interior design for ice-buckets and the like. And only Mr. Silver has anything risky or funny to say. Marlo is left to plead with mom.
The neurotic couple, played by Joanna Gleason and Kenneth Welsh, are less successful because they haven't found a way to come to terms with the incongruities of their characters. One moment these people will look at the pastel paintings on the wall and pronounce, "They're blank. They're blank." Shortly thereafter, they seem to have a gigantic overview of the entire familial situation when they charge the other couple with being their lusty daughter's "liberated parents with none of the responsibilities"--probably the most intelligent indictment of the evening, because these parents really must have some concern for this girl. (The audience appreciates that we never have to meet her.) How easy it is for Barbara and David to accuse them of doting, and the playwright Andrew Bergman thoroughly agrees, because the neurotic couple receive their poetic punishment in the end.
Bergman must have been troubled by mom's character, Sophie, as played by Olympia Dukakis, because he could not make her too deranged and unappealing for fear of losing our sympathy for her. She
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