Coming to Terms

The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife is the first play that Charles Busch did not expressly write as a vehicle for one of his own drag performances, and, it turns out, it‘s his safest and most bourgeois comedy -- it all but shouts Mittelbraue. It’s also been his biggest hit, one whose popularity carried it in 2000 from the Manhattan Theater Club to Broadway and, now, to L.A.‘s Ahmanson Theater. The story’s center is Marjorie Taub (Valerie Harper), an ennui-numbed hausfrau who lives on New York‘s Upper West Side with her husband, Ira (Tony Roberts), an allergy doctor who sees himself as a kind of Albert Schweitzer for the bronchially challenged poor. While Ira is an insufferable do-gooder who tans himself in the praise of others, Marjorie is a harmless culture vulture, a habitue of 92nd Street Y lectures and Film Forum retrospectives who talks in a sort of book-jacketspeak, oozing intellectual pretension and unfulfilled artistic longings.

Patronized by her husband and hectored by her yiddishe mother, Frieda (Shirl Bernheim), the moping Marjorie is suddenly given a shot of self-confidence by a chance encounter with her childhood friend and international bon vivant, Lee Green (Michele Lee), whom she hasn’t seen in 40 years. Not only does Lee claim to have been present at many of those years‘ great political and cultural events, she seems to have known or bedded many of their important figures (even if Busch’s historical math doesn‘t always add up). Before long, she has moved in with the Taubs for an indefinite stay.

Allergist’s Wife is a play whose story exists to support its stream of quips, an evening of punch lines in search of a plot -- if one were to subtract all of its digressive gags, there wouldn‘t be very much left. But that has mattered little to audiences, insofar as Busch’s dialogue crackles with hilarious laments and tart observations that skewer the intellectual ambitions and liberal assumptions of middle-class New York Jews, along with their reflexive support for good causes and for other minorities. Which, paradoxically, makes Allergist‘s Wife a perfect fit for its new stage, for it also ridicules the very political correctness associated with venues like the Ahmanson and the Mark Taper Forum.

Busch has said he wrote Allergist’s Wife for Linda Lavin, who performed as Marjorie in the New York productions. The current Lynne Meadow--directed show, with its glorious townhouse set by Santo Loquasto, is the original sans La Lavin, who has been replaced by Harper. It‘s a subtle but important “sans”: Where Lavin exuded a palpable weariness that evaporated under Lee’s influence, here Harper -- prone to mugging -- plays the role more overtly for laughs. It‘s still a winning performance, though, as are the turns by Roberts and Bernheim, both of whom play irritable characters whose common-sense humanity never deserts them. Even Lee, in the unsympathetic role of the shahtoosh-clad parasite Lee Green, brings a frisky charm to the proceedings.

In many ways Busch’s comedy resembles Woody Allen‘s films about Manhattan, and not just because of Tony Roberts’ presence. Like Allen‘s, Busch’s New York Jews wear their brains on their sleeves, all the while giving themselves over to self-improvement and voluntarism. But Allergist‘s Wife is also deeply conservative, for where Allen is affectionately bemused by New York’s liberal heartbeat, Busch seems positively appalled by it -- not only do the self-analytical Marjorie, Ira and Lee come off as foolish and prideful; Busch also has their personalities judged by Frieda, who, despite her querulousness, is presented as a down-to-earth arbiter of human behavior.

Seen one way, Lee is a “successful” version of Marjorie -- the embodiment of all the secret desires that Marjorie could not handle even if she were given the chance to realize them. The story‘s main disruption is not really Lee and her exotic cuisine or “pansexuality,” or her human-rights activism (which Busch paranoiacally equates with terrorism), but the fact that Lee effectively removes Ira as the center of both Marjorie and Frieda’s attention -- to Busch‘s thinking, this is the emergency that must be corrected and why everything must be restored to its earlier, “natural” order.

These quaintly Victorian views extend to the fun Busch pokes at the very Jewishness of the names mentioned in his story (Reba Fabrikant, Libby Fleischmann, Lillian Greenblatt), while at the same time picking on Lee for changing hers from Greenblatt to Green. At least Busch has cut Marjorie’s second-act speechifying on behalf of Israel which, regardless of one‘s politics, came out of nowhere and did nothing except pander -- albeit quite successfully -- to New York audiences. Busch, to his credit, has deleted these and lets his L.A. audiences applaud what makes them laugh, not what scares them.

Vicki Juditz is a woman with a story to tell. Many stories, really, for over the past 10 years she has regaled audiences with accounts of life events ranging from her conversion to Judaism, to her befriending of a Chinese immigrant woman to, most recently, the difficult birth of her daughter, Molly. Where Do Babies Come From?, now running at the Elephant Theater, is the autobiographical story of a woman who badly wants to have children but, after two miscarriages, discovers she can never bear them because she has only half a uterus. Four years ago, Juditz and her husbanddirector, Alan Kirschenbaum, decided to find a surrogate mother. What followed was a harrowing tale of adversity: The surrogate, Megan, first miscarried, then developed toxemia and other problems during the 35th week of her second attempt to have the couple’s baby.