These one-act plays from Woody Allen's 1975 book, Without Feathers, are vintage Allen, and an admirable choice for the amateur but well-established Strathclyde Theatre Group. Death begins with a man, Klienman, reluctantly being woken up and recruited to a vigilante gang to carry out one part of a secret mission to capture a serial murderer. The problem is, he doesn't know his part.
Despite his palpable anxiety, Andrew Townsley as Klienman (aka Woody Allen) is a joy to watch, with just the right measure of neurotic padding around the stage, wringing of hands, and fearing of death (''I'd rather do almost anything else''). Given the self-conscious, spatially unaware and unsustained New York accents of most of the rest of the cast, he is the exception in a mainly dry, confused performance.
God, then, comes as something of a revelation. Against a Grecian backdrop, Hepatitis is trying to write the end of a play in which Diabetes will take the lead role. Here the linearity endeth. Members of the cast emerge from the audience, Woody Allen himself is called for guidance, and Blanche DuBois defects from A Streetcar Named Desire to join in the action.
Thomas Gemmell as Diabetes and Andrew Dow as Hepatitis have wonderful comic timing, individually and together; it's not lost after Doris Levine joins the duo from the audience. She's a white-trash philosophy minor who casts some existential light and romantic love on the proceedings (''You're fictional, she's Jewish,'' Diabetes tells a love-struck Hepatitis. ''Do you know what the children would be like?'').
All things considered, leading with Death was a wise choice because God is simply a better play. It has a more complex structure, better developed characters, quick-fire gags that transcend the witty one-liner, and a typically Allenesque disregard for literary conventions. Indeed, the only amateur aspect of it was the gaggle of friends of the cast sitting in the front row, who were, ironically, more interested in their own
comic performance.
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