Tweaking Raw Nerves

By T.E.K.

MERT AND PHIL by ANNE BURR

Mert and Phil is a jarring mismatch between the drama of oppressive realism and the theater of the absurd. It is scabrous in word and action. Some of it is quite funny; some of it is extremely sad. It possesses a barbed honesty that obviously unsettled some of the playgoers who hissed and booed it on opening night, as well as several of the critics. Declaring a personal auto-da-fe WNEW-TV's usually commonsensical critic Stewart Klein declared that he wished to burn Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater and Director-Producer Joseph Papp.

Alcoholic Despondency. Except for New York magazine's ever fastidious John Simon, aesthetic outrage alone rarely elicits such exacerbated responses. The truth is that Mert and Phil abrasively tweaks raw nerves. Mert (Estelle Parsons) is well into middle age and has recently had one cancerous breast removed. Only too conscious that her breasts were the chief attraction she exerted on her husband, she is sinking into a state of garrulous alcoholic despondency. She swigs continuously from a bottle, and her only other visible activity is carrying a plunger to a stopped-up toilet. That facility is overemployed, since Mert's senile mother-in-law, also a tippler, is incontinent. The old lady has been fitted out with roller skates so that she can make her all-too-necessary trips at top speed.

Mert's husband Phil is a gregarious fuel-truck driver of excessive bonhomie who reeks of gasoline fumes. He cannot cope with his wife's mastectomy. He masturbates and cheats on the side. Just to make it doubly clear that sex is all that truly bound this couple together, Playwright Burr has another couple visit Mert and Phil, and this pair indulges in the most rabid preliminaries to cunnilingus seen on the New York stage since the late '60s.

Is the play, then, simply lubricious Erskine Caldwell country shipped north? Not really. Estelle Parsons' magnificently wrung-out performance as Mert would alone save it from that. The easy and obvious charge to bring against Mert and Phil is bad taste, but it, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. More than likely, the play and Joseph Papp are being lambasted for presenting subjects that audiences deeply dread facing: the corruption of the flesh, the death of love, and growing old in bleak utter loneliness. There may be too little craft in Mert and Phil, but there is undeniable courage.

T.E.K.

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