Dustin Hoffman makes fine directing debut

By Clive Barnes

(C) New York Times Service NEW YORK This Broadway season is full of surprises. At the Booth Theater it said goodby to 1974 with a zany farce by -Murray Schisgal delivered by director Dustin Hoffman with all the aplomb of a master-chef whipping up a souffle.

*

The play, "All Over Town," is the funniest that Schisgal has given us since "Luv." It is concerned with the quite impossible goings-on in a Manhattan duplex owned by an eccentric psychiatrist and his almost equally eccentric family and appendages.

Dr. Morris, the psychia trist, is bent on welfare work, as are his daughter and his daughter's fiance. They are interested in

the case of one young man who has impregnated five women with no less than nine children, and sent the whole lot of them on welfare. How could he be so inconsiderate?

ap-

What was the nature of this irresponsible, and parently irresistable, young man, and why did he believe that the world owed his families a living?

When a young black man arrives at the house to deliver a pair of shoes to the doctor, the daughter of the house, instantly and more or less plausibly mistakes him for the expected Louie Lucas, the Romeo-wrecker of hearts and welfare.

+

She expresses interest in his case, and the young man, aware that he has stepped into a misunderstanding, but later even more acutely aware that the doctor is offering him free board and lodgings for three weeks, plus pocket money and a new wardrobe, decides to relax and enjoy it.

The whole thing would not stand up in a court of law and it scarcely stands up in the theater. One moment's serious thought and the entire play is blown away.

Hoffman, in his first directorial assignment, makes sure that we are

sufficiently dazzled by ac-

Tryouts

Gfatah Wa TË Van

tion and acting alike that we never have time to sit back for that potentially dire minute.

He is helped by Schisgal's feverish, farcical invention:

Schisgal pours «excess upon excess. Add to the basic situation the wife's lover, the wife's layer's bed-ridden wife, a Swedish maid, à French chef, and his all three intent on stealing wife and a myopic burglar, the family jewels, plus “a black homosexual entrepeneur and you have the makings of some hilarious confrontations.

Cleavon Little is â model of smooth certitude as the jive-talking dude who dupes the family. His physical grace as an actor, here at to comic use, is really ro markable, and his timog as as impeccable as that of a championship tennis, player. However this is no one man gig, and all the others swing merrily along.

Barnard Hughes doctor has some beautifully dappy moments, and his amorous wife and socially amusingly played by Carol enquiring daughter are Teitel and Jill Eikenberry As the real Louie Lucas, Zane Lasky had some hilar iously. impassioned mo ments.

"All Over Town” is basically as insubstantial as thin air, but it is the kind of thin air that once in a while you can breathe like oxy gen. Profound it isn't; fun it is