Next Time, Same Station

GEORGE and Doris don't see each other during the year. But come a certain weekend in February each bids goodbye to a trusting spouse and flees to the security of a California cottage, where together they slough off the accumulated hurts of the past year and reaffirm the dreams that must sustain them until their next meeting. Charles Grodin-of The Heartbreak Kid-and Ellen Burstyn-acclaimed for her performances in The Exorcist and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore-are George and Doris. They are the only actors in the play. And though the California hideout and the idea behind it are hardly enough to make an original play, their performances turn Same Time, Next Year into a finely-tuned comedy.

The entire action of the play is set in the room that serves as the site of the lovers' annual tryst. While their surroundings-furnishings, proprietor and all-remain unaltered during the play's 24-year time span, Doris and George can hardly boast the same luck. Each finds himself trapped over time in a series of personae that represent responses to both the vicissitudes of personal experience and social and political developments in the outside world. George-originally a guilty young man who admits "I know I'm no bargain and I suspect I'm deeply neurotic" - follows a common enough route, seeking happiness first in the routines and rewards of the business world and then junking it all to first with transactional analysis and play cocktail piano stints at local bars. He ends up, predictably enough, as a complacent and graying professor of accounting at UCLA, Doris undergoes a nearly parallel development, but her stages are always curiously out of synch with his.

It is this dynamic-this sense that the two lovers are heading in the same direction without ever being at the same place simultaneously-that guides the action of the play. Tension suffuses the opening of each of the play's six scenes, as the pair try to recognize each other in the wake of the transformations wrought by time-In the last scene of the first act, for example, George-recently plagued by an annoying case of impotence-sees in his annual trip to California a potential source of relief. Instead, he encounters only additional frustration in the person of an eight-months-pregnant Doris. This pattern of blighted expectations recurs in the opening scene of the second act; this time, George-now a stuff, Establishment type-exchanges verbal thrusts with Doris-metamorphosed into a Berkeley flower child. Refusing indignantly to sleep with a former Goldwater voter, Doris sniffs, "And all the time I though Democrat."

In both cases, however, George and Doris eventually find their shared humanity sufficient bond against temporary biological and physical impediments. In he first of the two scenes, the lovers transcend the crisis when George delivers Doris's premature baby; In the second, when he reveals the roots of his bitterness in the recent death of his son by a sniper's bullet. Through the acts of birth, love and death-the rhythms that punctuate the cycle of life-the lovers reaffirm the ties that make them return each year.

ADMITTEDLY, the basic premise of Same Time, Next Year-the annual tryst-is contrived. Nor is the play as a whole devoid of serious flaws. The varying poses that the characters assume are perhaps too stereotypical, too facile a launching pad for tired television pilot jokes. The beginning of the show is especially weak; the humor is artificially imposed, and the emotional resonances that later reinforce the play's comic surfaces are mission.

But Ellen Burstyn and Charles Grodin work together so skillfully that Same Time, Next Year at its worst is never painful; their timing and intonation wring laughter from even the most hackneyed routines. And as their relationship grows, the play fortunately grows with them. The comedy becomes less superficial, more an organic product of the characters' grouping attempts to find stability in the midst of flux. Coupled with the increasing richness of the humor-and this play is in parts very, very funny-is an underlying layer of sadness, an awareness of the inevitability of change in a world where "it seems like it's just one damn thing after another."

If Same Time, Next Year is about the continuity in people's lives, the play is also concerned with another, related theme-man's need to cling to an illusion until it assumes its own reality. The vows of love that George and Doris exchange during their first meeting seem explicable only as an effort to excape from the less romantic everydayness of work and marriage. Early in the play Doris simultaneously affirms and questions the illusory nature of their relationship when she tells George, "You kept slipping into my reality." Later on George confides that he called her once during the year to tell her of his wife's death; but it was enough for him to let the phone ring five times to know that he could reach her if he wanted to. To call again would have meant obtruding himself into her "reality."

And yet the lovers' superficial attempts to compartmentalize their existence in this way never quite succeed. Their "real life" enters the room with them, distilled partly into tidy stories and photographs, glowering on the masks they spend the scene shedding. Once a year, in that room, a transformation occurs; fantasy is affirmed and reality thus made bearable. Doris and George leave their sanctuary armed with their dreams, which mediate between them and the harshness of the real world.

The conflict between illusion and reality is potentially tragic. In the prelude to the play's false ending, George confronts Doris with the alternative of leaving her husband to marry him or else losing him-and the dream he represents-forever. But Same Time, Next Year is anything but a tragedy; the conflict is exposed as spurious, and things go on as before. Both illusion and reality must be maintained: for in the end they meet and give life to each other.