Moonchildren,” currently being revived at the Second Stage, is Michael Weller’s 1972 comedy about a sensitive young man trying to come to terms with himself and the world around him. Set in 1965, it concerns a group of bright, privileged college students—the sort who sit around the kitchen of their communal house worrying about Vietnam and the future, and wondering what they’ll do if any of them get called up. There’s Bob (a music major), Ruth (a philosophy major), and Norman (mathematics). Then there’s farsighted Dick (majoring in Far Eastern studies, because it’s the going thing), Kathy, Bob’s girlfriend, who spends hers trying to get Bob to “relate,” and Mike and Cootie, who spend most of their time playing tricks on people. They think they’re pretty darned special, but they’re so bright and funny that we forgive them and find ourselves being drawn to their youth and cleverness. They’re funny about silly things, like milk bottles and academic journals, and about serious things, like peace marches and the war.
Funniest of all are the two pranksters, Mike and Cootie. In a sense the play’s pivotal figures, though Bob is its hero, they get their kicks by telling elaborate lies about terrible things that have never happened. Encouraged, at first, to despise those characters who either believe what Mike and Cootie tell them or don’t know how to play mind games themselves, we begin to see that life with Mike and Cootie is a no-win game: believe them and you become the butt of their jokes, call their bluff and they make a fool of you in some other way. Moreover, Mike and Cootie’s lies are dangerous: they cause people harm. We end up not knowing what to think about Mike and Cootie’s lying, or how to feel about those characters who by the end of the play have learned to lie, too. Self-conscious hypocrisy and malice, it seems, are preferable to the dishonesty and bigotry of The System—but we’re not really sure why.
Still, “Moonchildren” is a good play—one with the grace to examine what it thinks it loves most, and to do so theatrically. The current production shows it off to good advantage, with an excellent cast, led by Alan Ruck and Sam Robards as Mike and Cootie. Particularly helpful, I think, is a slightly anachronistic twist that the director, Mary B. Robinson, has given to the play. It’s half retro, half eighties sensibility. Mr. Ruck and Mr. Robards have been directed like screwball-comedy pranksters. (One thinks of the fast-talking screenwriters in Sam and Bella Spewack’s nineteen-thirties Hollywood satire “Boy Meets Girl.”) At the same time, while Charles H. McClennahan’s set seems right for 1965 (except for one Grateful Dead poster), Mimi Maxmen’s costumes often seem to look forward to what students were wearing on university campuses in the seventies, or what they wear now. It’s as if Miss Robinson understood that some sixties fashion, like some sixties thinking and behavior, might seem less appealing now than it did in its own era.
More than anything else, what gives “Moonchildren” an eighties flavor is the way that this production moves the two pranksters from the play’s periphery to its center. As Mr. Ruck and Mr. Robards play them, Weller’s Mike and Cootie resemble no one so much as the real-life pranksters Penn and Teller, back in New York, at the Ritz Theatre for the holiday season, with an even better version of their Off-Broadway show. A two-man comedy team of stage magicians, Penn Jillette and Teller (whose first name nobody but his mother knows) belong not to Weller’s generation—if you figure that theatrical generations go in decades—but to the one just after. Where “Moonchildren” comes out of the Theatre of Seriousness, “Penn & Teller” could be said to represent Post-Serious Theatre, whose most interesting development has been the New Vaudeville movement: performers who—like Bill Irwin and the Flying Karamazov Brothers—have chosen to devote their lives to reviving lost or dying arts.
What makes the New Vaudeville metavaudeville is its self-consciousness, the degree to which it ends up being, partly about itself—not about the performers but about what they do. This is self-consciousness as an act of criticism, not self-glorification: the art of juggling or tumbling or fire-eating or performing magic tricks taken to so high and so sophisticated a level that the audience has to think about its nature in relation to the rest of the world. Penn and Teller specialize in doing what Penn calls “tipping the gaff to the lay public,” showing the audience how a particular trick is done—something, he’s quick to point out, you’re never supposed to do. Penn says (Teller, by the way, never talks) that they do this out of perversity, to antagonize the magic establishment. But, of course, it’s the ultimate tour de force—demonstrating that how the act is done is beside the point. You catch your breath even when you know that such and such is going to happen and how and why—you catch your breath anyway. It’s an idea best articulated by Penn himself at the end of their show at the Ritz, when he sits down in Dennis Parichy’s half-darkness, with John Lee Beatty’s suggestion of an empty stage behind him, and begins to talk quietly about the tradition of the American sideshow.
The perversity, the affectation of malice, is where Penn and Teller resemble the characters in Michael Weller’s play. Just as Mike and Cootie tell lies for the hell of it, to dissociate themselves from the hypocrisies of society, Penn and Teller play elaborate tricks on people for the hell of it, and as a way of divorcing themselves from the phoniness and sentimentality of the traditional show-biz world. Penn spends the evening heaping abuse on the public, never praising an audience draftee (Robert’s O.K! He’s cool!”) except to put the rest of us down. (“He knows things the rest of you are gonna have to learn.”) But life with Penn and Teller isn’t a no-win game, the way it is with Mike and Cootie and Letterman: Penn and Teller aren’t really contemptuous. They manage to get across to us that their malice is only pretense, and this makes moral point—something about affection divorced from sentimentality. You find yourself touched by them yet aware that being touched by them would be the last thing to win their approval.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, December 21, 1987