"Desk Set' should stay in closet
Arts & Entertainment // Entertainment
Robert Hurwitt Nov. 6, 1995
WHY, ONE wonders, would anyone want to stage an all-male, gay version of William Marchant's 1955 comedy, "The Desk Set" ? Why, in fact - with the near-classic 1957 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy film available at any good video store - would anyone want to revive the play at all?
Danny Scheie, the recently deposed artistic director at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, is making not one but two arguments for a reconfigured revival at Theatre Rhinoceros. One is a long program essay on the need for gay theater artists to "hijack" and "colonize" the straight plays that have long held sway in the theater. The other is Scheie's production of the play, which opened Saturday. Neither argument is terribly convincing.
As promised, he's staged Marchant's office comedy with an all-male cast but not in drag. All the women's roles are played as flamboyantly out gay men. The male authority figures are more covertly gay. The idea, as explained in the show's publicity, is to explore the notion that out gays suffer the same forms of workplace discrimination that women do.
In practice, the idea scarcely comes up. Rhino's "Desk Set" is, instead, an intermittently entertaining comedy with a heavy-handed, extraneous agenda. For all the broad winks and mugging in Scheie's staging, all these men playing roles with women's names, talking about getting married, proves neither interesting, liberating nor amusing for very long.
The problem, as anyone who's seen the movie should know, is that "Desk Set" isn't about sexual office politics. It's a rather quaint, early look at what the computer would bring to the workplace. In the movie - and, to a lesser extent, in the play - fears of computer-generated mass layoffs turn out to be largely unfounded. To hijack a popular phrase from the same period: "How sweet it was."
A bigger problem, however, is that Marchant's script isn't as interesting or funny as the screenplay Phoebe and Henry Ephron adapted from it. Missing, along with some of the banter, is one leg of the sexual triangle. There's no developing romance between the Hepburn and Tracy characters in the play - only the long-stalled romance between Bunny Watson (that was Hepburn) and her boss (Gig Young in the movie).
Scheie tries to compensate for that by using the movie's ending and by punching up the erotic electricity between his Bunny (Doug Holsclaw) and computer whiz Richard Sumner (Eric Newton), highlighting their first meeting with blasts of "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" as an added comic touch. Given that everyone else onstage is in a state of perpetual sexual heat, however, the Bunny-Richard romance just blends into the general milieu - or rut.
Nor is it clear why this Bunny, head of the research department for a radio and TV network, should be impatient with his / her romantically slow boss, Abe Cutler (Randy Wendelin). In Scheie's version, they've been having an affair for seven years and Abe still wants to tear Bunny's pants off at a moment's notice.
Holsclaw, at least, is a reasonably commanding figure as Bunny, trying to sort out his / her romantic muddle and protect his department from the inroads of Richard's new computer at the same time. Playing with numerous nods to Hepburn - from the occasional tossed off inflection to the photo ( "my mother" ) on his bookshelf - he delivers his punch lines with sharp timing and an engaging blend of intelligence, subdued passion and bemused disinterest.
He's at his best the closer he sticks to playing the comedy of the script, as in his off-handed demolition of Richard's intelligence test, or in carrying the rhythms of Longfellow's "Hiawatha" over into ordinary conversation. Other, campier, attempts to add to the humor meet with mixed success. A running gag (if you'll pardon the expression) about bulimia pushes the camp element too far.
Wendelin is pretty much all well-buffed macho stud as Abe. Newton plays Sumner as a standard-issue computer nerd, most touching when he feels left out at the office Christmas party, with an on-again, off-again sexual attraction to Bunny. A tart, eternally disgruntled P.A. Cooley, a seen-it-all Colman Domingo and an ever-eager Brad Smith comprise Bunny's staff. Kim Larsen effectively caricatures a host of small roles, all of which seem to be just as libidinous as everybody else in this hothouse alternative office universe.
Scheie stages the show with some comic snap, cutting the script a bit to bring it in at just under two hours. He's also given it a fairly handsome production on Iva Walton's clever set, with library book stacks that revolve to become a comically massive old-fashioned computer (enhanced by Michael Romero's flashing lights and Robby MacLean's sound effects).
The final result, though, never does get around to answering the question of whether there's anything here worth reviving. The film still stands on its own. This
"Desk" play wobbles.
"The Desk Set' * PLAYWRIGHT William Marchant * DIRECTOR Danny Scheie * CAST Doug Holsclaw, Eric Newton, P.A. Cooley, Colman Domingo, Brad Smith, Randy Wendelin, Kim Larsen * THEATER Rhinoceros, through Dec. 2 (415-861-5079)<
Robert Hurwitt
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Robert Hurwitt came to the San Francisco Chronicle as theater critic in 2000 after serving in the same position for the San Francisco Examiner for the previous decade. As a critic and reporter, he has covered the remarkably active and diverse Bay Area theater scene for publications ranging from the East Bay Express to California Magazine and the Los Angeles Times since 1978. A graduate of New York University, with a master's degree from UC Berkeley, he has served several times as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize for drama and is a recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism. He is also a proud father and grandfather.
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