Alice in Underwear by the Natural Theatricals
By: Tim Treanor
In Paula Alprin’s new play, Alison Alice (Alprin), a dyspeptic, Anglophile critic with a bad back, is given ninety minutes of what for by spokespeople for the mysterious producer, Sue Z. Not that you’ll mind too much - after all, Alice is an anti-Irish, anti-French anti-Semite, who casually abuses her secretary. Worse, she’s a critic. And when it turns out that the spokespersons are something more than ordinary press flacks, watch out!
In her unusually chatty program notes, Alprin lays out her play’s objective plainly. She means to skewer critics who base their judgments not on anything intrinsic to the play, but on the dramas in their own personal lives. Such critics, she claims, wield their vast powers corruptly.
Of course, she’s right, except for the supposition that critics have vast powers. The observation is true equally of anyone who exercises discretion in his profession. The judge. The business executive, poised to decide whether another round of rightsizing is required. The police officer, trying to determine whether to introduce the agitated suspect to the God of his choice.
The various spokespersons in Alice in Underwear spend their time trying to call Alice to account for an actress who popped herself after being the subject of a devastating Alice review. After a prolonged inquisition in which the spokespersons appear to develop supernatural powers, Alice eventually admits that, yes, her critique was driven by a parallel between the play and an unhappy event in her own home life, and in addition by the opportunity to use a clever headline of her own invention.
While I devoutly hope that what I am about to say causes no one to do a bad thing to herself, I must confess that Alice in Underwear falls well short of the objective that it sets for itself. The dialogue - while at times extremely clever and poetic - meanders irrelevantly over the landscape of related materials, and is only periodically yanked back to the main point of the story. An extended dialogue about a show which Alice liked and everyone else panned serves no discernable purpose whatsoever. Similarly, Alice’s diatribes about an absent critic - Sandy “Sunday” Hunter - describe nothing and illuminate nothing.
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