Out to Lunch

JAMES THURBER used to call his New Yorker office on his day off, asking for Mr. Thurber. He would say he was greatly relieved to discover that Thurber was not in, and that therefore he must be where he thought he was. This schizoid strain runs through A Thurber Carnival, a set of Thurber skits and short stories currently in production at the Ex.

A Thurber figure dominates nearly all of the fifteen sketches which comprise the show. This character's vacillation from cynical to maudlin and from macho to castrated propels the show's bitter but sometimes precious humor. The play is full of disturbed men who can't decide what role to play, who can't tell, as Thurber never could, whether they're coming or going. A would-be wife murderer cowers when she threatens him with a monkey wrench. Walter Mitty fantasizes that he is Bogart, Patton, and Dr. Christian Barnard, but his wife can't seem to take him seriously. Thurber himself appears, his world collapsing around him because, as usual, his publishers can't figure out where he lives among all his previous and present addresses.

The skits are clever enough. A marriage breaks up over the respective merits of Greta Garbo and Donald Duck. But the punchlines are too facile (man to lemming: only thing I don't understand about you lemmings is why you run to the sea and drown yourselves. Lemming to man: and the thing I don't understand about you men is why you don't) and the wit occasionally succumbs to Richard Goldfarb's erratic direction.

Word Dance, the first bit, is slow and haphazard. The characters dance and freeze, and then one delivers a pungent one-liner. The jokes are not terribly funny (where did you get those big brown eyes and that tiny mind?) but pointless facial expression and vapid delivery don't help them any.

Nor does The Day the Dam Broke, a classic Thurber apocalypse, succeed as a twenty minute dramatic monologue, although Kerry Konrad struggles bravely through it. But in the second act, where the skits are fewer and the acting more demanding, everything comes together, culminating in James Doherty's painfully schizo portrayal of Walter Mitty.

Thurber is a classic American wit, and if this production works it is because of his writing. Like his stories it is flawed and evasive, but who can resist the disarming deviance of the little woman who smiles blandly at the audience and says "I never dreamed their union had been blessed with issue till their daughter stabbed the superintendent of schools."