Tale of the Allergist's Wife, The

The Tale of the Allergist's Wife is a play that refers to many serious ideas without ever once having one of its own. Is that a bad thing? Depends. Do you want to think while at the theater, or would you prefer to pretend you've been thinking? For those who prefer the latter, Tale is ideal. Charles Busch's dialogue is certainly very funny, and Valerie Harper, who hasn't made me laugh since she played Rhoda on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, is sensational. I sat in the very back row of the rear mezzanine, and she sold every punchline with wit and physicality. She is at the center of 99 percent of the show, as Marjorie, the wife of Ira the allergist, played by Tony Roberts, who is as good a straight man today as he was in the Woody Allen films "Annie Hall" and "Play It Again, Sam." (Michele Lee, whom I have had a crush on for decades, was replaced by her competent standby, Jana Robbins, the performance I attended, but the part of Lee appears tailormade for Ms. Lee's beauty, high energy, and quick verbal facility.)

The story is about, um, well...there isn't really a story. The allergist and his terribly depressed wife (her shrink recently died) live in a nice fancy apartment, and they have a doorman who has plenty of time to hang out in said apartment, and Marjorie's elderly mom, Frieda (Shirl Bernheim) is also usually there, saying "fuck" or "fuck you" a lot and talking about her bowel movements every time food is served. The matinee audience screamed with laughter every time Frieda delivered a zinger, which is at least once per minute that she's onstage. The action, such as it is, mostly involves Marjorie (Ms. Harper) and her new friend Lee, who is obviously, from her first moments onstage, a con artist, although no one onstage wonders at her tall tales for a moment. She has been everywhere, done everything, and known everyone, although she doesn't seem to have a home, or be aware of the existence of the cell phone. Marjorie gets to talk like a pseudo-intellectual to Lee, tossing off quotations that seem to indicate she's read a lot, while musing about "meaning" without ever saying anything meaningful herself. We also learn, during these dialogues, that Marjorie has written a failed novel that is dazzling in its pretentiousness (for which she invented her own system of punctuation). Does any of this come up again, as a source of laughs, or to flesh out what a fool Marjorie is? No. Never. It's exposition for a play we never get to see. And, by the way, Marjorie's depression magically vanishes as soon as she has a new friend.

Between the play's two acts, Lee has sex with Ira and Marjorie (it has to be offstage, because it would be impossible for the couple to stay in character while doing what they would never do), and the conclusion of the play is when Lee gets kicked out of the house when she presumes to suggest a second phone line be installed for her.

As situation comedy, it's a shallow laff riot, fed mostly by Valerie Harper's neurotic energy and Bernheim's pluckiness; as playwriting, it's mystifying: Not only is there no real story, the potential at least for farce goes unexplored. For example: Lee feeds Ira, the allergist, some food, and it drips onto his fly. He blots at his fly just before Marjorie, his wife, reenters the room. Does Marjorie see the wet spot and wonder how it got there? Lee is, after all, trying to seduce him at that moment. No, it's never mentioned again. Once Lee is kicked out, Ira suddenly rushes out the door for an appointment he apparently forgot until that moment. He's going after Lee, right? (He's said that sex with her restored vitality that had been lacking within him for decades.) Well, no, because the play ends one minute later on an upbeat note, and Ira's exit only serves to get him offstage for Marjorie's final speech, which appears to show that not only is she now talking like Lee, but she's fully over her depression now. Too bad the playwright hadn't seen Act I, when that already happened!

That's not all. In Act I, Lee's job had been "political fundraising," but in Act II, it's "charitable." The doorman, Mohammed, is from Iraq, a detail that comes up only in Act II, when he is aware that Lee's charity is shady. After taking such care to give us one character who is not only dark-skinned but Muslim, and not just Muslim but from Iraq, this comedy uses that fact only for a plot point any of the characters could have offered, and a laughless one at that! Much is made of a PowerBook onstage that Ira uses for email (although he doesn't seem to need any phone connection for it), but the only payoff from that is when Valerie Harper hilariously tries to surf the web to find someone to euthanize her mom. Why couldn't the shadiness of the charity come via the Web too, rather than a pointlessly elaborate setup that wasn't funny?

Again, it's mystifying why such setups are not cashed in properly.The revival of Noises Off, across the street at the Brooks Atkinson, only reminds me how deeply satisfying farce, the form of theatre best suited to Laughs Above All Else, works when every setup is rewarded with two or three payoffs apiece. In The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, setups, even elaborate ones, get zero to one payoff each. The performance offeres plenty of laughs just the same, but nothing I wouldn't be just as content to see on television.