Colin Higgins' screenplay for "Harold And Maude" became a 1972 feature film project for director Hal Ashby, with Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort starring in the May-December story of the love affair between an 80-year-old woman and a teenaged boy. The film flopped, but Higgins turned the script into a play, which was directed by Jean-Louis Barrault in Paris and ran seven years. The film version then resurfaced as a cult hit and has spawned a slew of "Harold And Maude" websites. Rights to the play have not been available locally for some time, but thanks to Ellen Geer's relationship to the Higgins estate -- she was in the original movie -- Theatricum Botanicum has been able to mount a production, enabling us to revisit the world of Colin Higgins again. And what an odd, wacky world it is, a mixture of black humor and despair, New Age optimism and uplift.
Higgins plays up the differences between Harold and Maude for all they're worth, with the latter constantly trying to pull the boy out of his shell and connect him to life. Harold (Aaron Angello), you see, is a weird, lonely brat who is not only in rebellion against his bourgeois, conventional mom (Susan Angelo, in a sharply satirical performance) but loves to flirt with suicide and death, and shock potential girlfriends by pulling ghoulish practical jokes (such as pretending to chop off his hand with a meat cleaver). Maude (Ellen Geer) is not only accepting of his behavior -- whatever human beings do is fine with her -- but sees potential and goodness in him. Slowly, she turns him away from darkness by teaching him, a la Henry Higgins, to smell the flowers, play the banjo and not be afraid to love (yes, she even takes him to bed). Maude is an unregenerate hippie who scorns private property, defies the law and turns somersaults when she feels like it.
She also brims over with such touchy-feely sentiments as: "Don't just be good. Make good things happen." As Harold sheds layers of gloom and doom and gravitates toward Maude's world, his mother pulls him in the other direction by trying to fix him up with a succession of computer dates who might prove to be marriagable material. Harold, of course, keeps driving the girls away with his outrageous behavior.
Basically, Harold And Maude is a loosely strung-together series of vaudeville skits and blackouts: short scenes that repeat the same comic setup and fail to advance the skimpy narrative. Higgins' original script was 20 minutes long and was a comic gem; by puffing it up to two and a half hours, repetition and even annoyance set in. Higgins tries to save the day by making Maude so endearing that she could win over a stone, and by emphasizing the importance of love, in all its forms and shapes. Higgins himself has admitted that Harold and Maude is a souffle of a play. While the large, outdoor Theatricum Botanicum amphitheater isn't necessarily the best place for a souffle to rise, Davis, Geer and the rest of 15-person company manage to bring the feat off. Too bad the souffle wasn't made with half a dozen eggs instead of two.
