Tower of Babble

By T.E.K.

ONCE IN A LIFETIME by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman

Abandon sanity, all ye who enter Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater for the revival of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's 1930 farce, Once in a Lifetime. It is well worth the effort.

This show is a roller coaster of merriment, with hairpin turns of plot, zany swoops of emotion and a breakneck tempo. But for fanciers of substance in entertainment, soap bubbles would be solider. Kaufman and Hart twisted their comic vise on Hollywood at just the time the movie colony was panicking over emergent speech. Jolson had sung; could Shakespeare be far behind? In panic, Hollywood raided Broadway for its voices.

Three broke vaudevillians decide to become tower builders in Babel. George (John Lithgow), May (Deborah May) and Jerry (Treat Williams) open an elocution school in Hollywood to prep silent stars for the talkies. Jerry riffles through people like a deck of cards, May has the patience of Florence Nightingale, and George is purer than the infancy of truth and madder than his true love (Julia Duffy). Through simple unpollutable honesty, George becomes chief of staff to a manic-depressive studio mogul, Herman Glogauer. George S. Irving plays this role as if he were a Yiddish Mussolini.

What obviously amused Kaufman and Hart was that the Hollywood of the period was a Seventh Avenue transplant.

Glogauer and his opportunistic opponents are ex-garment district New York furriers. The playwrights also perceived that the place was a squirrel's paradise. The norm was then, and now, nuttiness.

As a high priestess in the realm of the irrational, Jayne Meadows Allen does a deadly parody of Louella Parsons, and Max Wright is a marvel of frustration as a writer with nothing to show for his work but a gilded cage. If one name must rank above the other 28 in the cast, it has to be that of John Lithgow, whose simple-souled George cements his reputation as an actor of formidable versatility.

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