Art Is Messy

By RICHARD CORLISS

ROMANCE LANGUAGE by Peter Parnell

Last night Walt Whitman had the strangest dream. There he was, staring out his bedroom window, when who should hop in but Huck Finn, itching to travel. "Dress warmly," Walt's dead mom told him. And we're off to see Louisa May Alcott, who's having an affair with a Tahitian prince. Over there's Charlotte Cushman, the noted actress, playing Hamlet to Emily Dickinson's Ophelia; they become co-stars and lovers. Old Ralph Waldo Emerson is having a chat with the dead Henry David Thoreau: "Sex can be messy; art can't. That's why I've always preferred it." Then just about everyone shows up in Montana, where Louisa falls for General George Armstrong Custer, and Charlotte dallies with a Dietrichesque saloon singer who is really a man. They all die at Little Big Horn and go to heaven. And in the wink of a REM, the dream is over.

Like most dreams, Romance Language builds up its head of hallucinatory steam only when the night is half over. But at full throttle, Playwright Parnell's mixture of historical figures and fanciful situations makes a genial noise. This is the land of vaudeville revisionism previously charted by Indians, Travesties and Cloud 9, where social satire speaks in the vocabulary of dreams--the mind's own romance language. It is a pleasure to see Cynthia Harris (Charlotte), Valerie Mahaffey (Emily) and the 19 other cast members cavort so merrily on the tabletop stage of Manhattan's Playwrights Horizons Theater, complementing the grandeur of Parnell's vision with the grandiosity of their performances. As Walt might have proclaimed, Dream big, boys and girls! And dream on.

--By Richard Corliss