Stage: Overblown 'Fat Friend'

By Bill Doll

The title of Dobama's latest, "My Fat Friend," by Charles Laurence, isn't going to send anyone panting to the box office. Dreáry, 1950s TV situation comedies powered by one stale joke came wrapped in titles like that. But, the relationships between books and their covers holding true, the play is much better.

Laughing as as hard as people did in that basement theater on Coventry Rd. Thursday has to be illegal. It's either too good for you or dangerous. The play may even be better than the production. It's hard to say. The comedy is only the wellwatered top soil carefully protecting the roots of friendship among three companions.

It is those roots that Ron Newell, who directed, and his cast, are not adept enough at digging out.

"My Fat Friend" is Vicky, a 29-year-old unmarried whose figure at its most expanded bookseller at her most expanded, would make the Goodyear blimp lean on its mooring and weep.

Vicky (Mary Anne M. Sheboy) is something of an alcoholic junkie kleptomaniac about food. She about has two roomers, James (Charles St. Clair) and Henry (John Klein). James, a author, does the cooking and helps in Vicky's book store.

Henry is to timid what the atom bomb is to silence: He is a vain, controlling, thoroughly

outrageous, homosexual and endlessly appealing. Mark this character; this is a part to remember.

John Klein, with the jowls of some huggablemutation between Walter Matthau's hangdog look, Zero Mostel's innocent guile, and a bleached sausage, is the only reason you really need for going to this play.

When a customer takes a fancy to Vicky, Henry, to whom one says no with difficulty, determines that the time has come to drag out the thin girl Vicky.

The battle of the bulge succeeds. She becomes sylphlike. But the consequences made a marvelous drill sergeant, had a anticipated.

Here is where the difficulties set in. "Friends" switches in the second act from straight-out repartee to comedy as tool for exploring the seeds of a relationship.

Ron Newell's direction, which keeps the button pushed on the laughter, lacks the details of the tender sinews of companionship which hold this odd trio together.

Mary Anne M. Sheboy, Charles St. Clair, and Charles Goodwill (the suitor), give fine, even performances. But we aren't allowed to travel below the comedy until it is too late, until the marrow of friendship is too far out from behind its mask of fat, homosexuality, and timidity.