Allen's Power Failure

ALVY SINGER closes Annie Hall with the greatest exit line since Casablanca When he laments that relationships are painful, messy and usually disastrous, only to be pursued because "we need the eggs," everyone in the theater looks at his neighbor. Those in the company of a romantic interest ruefully admit how likely things are to end badly, those who don't have to share their popcorn wistfully wish they could.

Woody Allen has built his career by making us laugh and look at our neighbors and ourselves. His characters in film and print inevitably exhibit the flaws we least like to admit in ourselves, but Allen can point that out to us only by making us laugh at them. When Boris goes dancing down the road with Death to Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kieje in Love and Death we chuckle Kieje was a hero but Boris certainly isn't, he's just another schmuck out of his element, a schmuck who got screwed, and a schmuck who admits it. And we know that eventually we too are going to get screwed.

Allen is a brilliant comedian, but he is an uncomfortable one. The man also invented the unwilling cocktail party crashing moose (And the moose mingled...) and redubbed a serious Japanese spy movie into an outrageous parody of itself knows he can make people laugh, but he wants to do more. There weren't many laughs in Interiors, and those in his most recent Stardust Memories made us uncomfortable, we couldn't relate to them

It's just as hard to relate to the characters in The Floating Lightbulb Allen's latest play Billed as a bittersweet comedy; the script--published a year after its first staging--unfortunately isn't very funny and certainly isn't very sweet It's hard to tell what it is Pathos can be gripping, but only when the people are worth caring about The folks in The Floating Lightbulb are real enough; like anyone, they screw around, they stutter, and they cry. But there is nothing special about them, and it takes too much effort to care. Without making the play funny enough to spark our empathy through laughter, Allen leaves us flat. The play, its characters, and the emotions it hints at go nowhere.

The Floating Lightbulb is the story of the Pollacks, a struggling family on the outskirts of everything in 1945 Brooklyn. Max is a small-time numbers runner and waiter supporting a mistress he can't afford, in debt to the loansharks and waiting for his number to come in. Enid is supporting the family by some unspecified means and worrying about her philandering husband and her drop-out kid. Steve, an incipient delinquent, steals his father's pocket change to gamble with the boys, plays hookey and perhaps commits arson. Steve will end up like his father, on the edge of the rackets, looking over his shoulder for the cops and the robbers. His brother Paul is harder to place; neither we nor anyone else knows where he is going. Though most of the plot concerns him and his failures, it flip-flops pointlessly, meandering as unsympathetically as the character himself "Don't downgrade yourself," his mother constantly nags. "A hundred and forty-eight IQ is genius." But Paul hangs his head, stutters and complains that the people and the walls are closing in at school. So he doesn't go and spends hours gazing at the wonders in the magic store.

Magic is Paul's only interest. The play opens and closes with one of his tricks, an illuminated lightbulb floating magically to the ceiling and back down again. Paul has no goal other than to practice, timidly stammering that he isn't ready to perform, but after a chance meeting with a talent manager his mother pushes him onto the stage. He fails his audition miserably, tripping over himself and botching endlessly practiced tricks. But the occasion sparks a brief romance between Enid and the manager, Jerry Wexler. The moment doesn't last, of course; it only brings the tired and confused characters deeper into disillusion. In the end, Allen hardly even resolves their plight, instead he fumbles into symbolism, as Paul's magic wand turns to flowers in a strange ending which ought to resonate but doesn't.

THE PROBLEM with The Floating Lightbulb is that while Allen is painting the common problems he always has, this time he shows them only as common. His previous plays and movies worked because he magnified his own fear, shyness, or insecurity enough to catch reflections from his audiences' souls. Allen plays such as Don't Drink the Water and Play it Again Sam revolved around the Woody Allen Character. Allen even played the lead in the film version of the latter, and in other movies he consistently played himself or some version thereof.

The closing line in the biographical sketch for Lightbulb says that Woody Allen's "one regret in life is that he is not someone else," but in no work yet has he made a serious effort at being anyone but himself. Maybe the Allen character in this play is Paul, but it's hard to see how or why and impossible to cast the author as anyone else.

A writer shouldn't have to put himself in every work to make it work. What makes almost all of Allen's other work so effective is that his own ever present character has been someone everyone can laugh at but the cruel fact is that while we always laugh, we never really care what happens to him. We laugh at the guy who slips on the banana peel and think, "Thank God it wasn't me." Up till now, Allen has walked through a United Fruit warehouse to show us what we fear.

His desire to be taken seriously and to leave us with the same stark blacks and whites in which he now shoots his movies is understandable, but so far it hasn't worked Allen hasn't yet learned the art that would make pathos powerful without laughs--at least not well enough to make us care.