Kitchen Kooks

By T.E. Kalem

ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR

byALANAYCKBOURN

This play walks a zigzag line between comedy and farce and often manages to be staggeringly funny. Alan Ayckbourn, a sly chronicler of British suburbia, gets three couples together on successive Christmas Eves in their respective kitchens and wreaks droll havoc on their status and character.

Kitchen No. 1 is geometric and blindingly yellow, a paean to plastic modernity. It is the pride of a feverish Mrs.

Dutch Cleanser, Jane (Carole Shelley), who treats dust spots as germs. Her husband Sidney (Larry Blyden) is a shopkeeper who seems destined for smaller things. Their guests arrive. Ronald (Richard Kiley) is an upper-class banker of such genteel indifference that he reads a washing-machine manual while Sidney smarmily courts him.

Ronald's wife Marion (Geraldine Page) mouths snobbish insults, knocks back the gin and flirts with a swinging architect, Geoffrey (Tony Roberts), whose wife Eva (Sandy Dennis) moves through the room like a zombie's zombie. The truly running gag of the act --and it is more laugh provoking than it sounds--is the spectacle of Jane dashing in and out of a drenching rain in quest of a six-pack of tonic water.

Kitchen No. 2 (Geoffrey and Eva's) is a blueprint of architectural chic, but its sanitary appointments compare unfavorably with those of the Black Hole of Calcutta. When Jane sees Eva with her head in the oven, she assumes that Eva is cleaning the stove. Not so. While Jane takes over the stove scouring, Sidney copes with a stopped drain, and Ronald dances an electrocution waltz with some naked wiring, Eva sleepwalks her way fixedly toward suicide. She tries to jump out a window, impale herself on a knife, throttle herself with a rope, electrocute herself and take poison. Half dead with fatigue, she ends the act conducting the others, with a waveringly insistent hammer for a baton, in a chorus of The Twelve Days of Christmas.

Kitchen No. 3 (Ronald and Marion's) is a rambling country affair. This is the least funny sequence, but it does contain a wacky party game. Throughout the evening, lickety-split timing, top acting and Ayckbourn's eye for the nuances of social ascent and descent make this comedy a present happily opened before Dec. 24. "T.E.Kalem

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