The hero of “Borderline,” Charles Graham (Cotter Smith), is one of those prosperous, successful young men, suddenly so common on the New York stage, who can’t figure out what’s wrong with their lives. A marketing executive with a sense that there is more to life than shampoo, Charles feels something lacking in his marriage to Susan (Susan Bruce), but doesn’t quite care enough to do anything about it. At the beginning of the play, he overhears a double murder being committed in the house next door and, on discovering that the killing may have been a crime of passion—a man murdering his wife and her lover—is driven to question whether he really loves his own wife, since he has never killed her.
What seems to bother Charles most is his inability to stop treating women badly. He knows better, of course—who wouldn’t? Still, he cheats on his wife with a gorgeously foxy colleague (Sharon Schlarth) and indulges in quasi-sadistic motel-room sex with his voluptuous young secretary (Colleen Quinn). All three women are remarkably obliging—the secretary willing to be hurt, the wife willing to make do without the “intimacy” she craves, the colleague determined to make herself scarce after a one-night stand—so you’d think Charles would be happy. But is he? Not one bit. What are two masochistic women and a career girl to do?
“Borderline” is one of two unpleasant and mildly exploitive one-act plays by John Bishop currently being produced at the Circle Repertory Company under the collective title “Borderlines.” Mr. Bishop, a resident playwright at the Circle Rep, was the author of last season’s “The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940,” a silly but innocuous farce, which did not transfer well to Broadway. A send-up of country-house mysteries, “Musical Comedy Murders” was a self-consciously bad play that reveled in its own vacuity and hokum. “Borderline,” by contrast, is a bad play masquerading as a good play. Ostensibly about man’s inhumanity to man (that’s “man” with a small “m,” so as not to include woman), it labors strenuously to bring forth meaningful social commentary; in fact, though “Borderline” caters to the masculine appetites it presents to criticize.
The second play, “Keepin’ an Eye on Louie,” is marginally less unpleasant and exploitive than the first. In it, Frank and Dave, two undercover detectives (played by Charles Brown and Bruce McCarty, respectively), spy on a Mafia lord from an empty apartment in the company of a policewoman named Angie (Miss Quinn), and a mob informer named Joey (Joe Maruzzo) who is disguised as a woman. Both the male cops are preoccupied by marital problems, Frank because his wife (Brenda Denmark) seems to be having an affair and Dave because he has lost interest in sex. Dave is physically intimidated by his wife (Miss Schlarth). “There’s so much of her,” he exclaims at one point. Dave occasionally discusses this problem with the police therapist (Mr. Smith). But all for naught. In the penultimate moments of “Keepin’ an Eye on Louie,” a mobster bursts into the apartment and guns down Frank and Joey. The play ends with Dave, clearly shattered by it all, trying on his wife’s slip.
That Mr. Bishop is eager to explore the possibilities in his sententious title is clear. “Borderlines” is meant to be about false demarcations in the combat zone of life, and the unnecessary boundaries men set up—between male and female, nation and nation, clan and clan. (To emphasize this point, Mr. Bishop has a character called the Lecturer, played by Miss Denmark, wandering in and out, between the short takes of his first play, reciting grisly facts about border wars in English and American history.) But Mr. Bishop never really gets beyond observing that such boundaries exist. His play doesn’t go anywhere it hasn’t already been in the first five minutes.
Mr. Bishop seems not to have understood the meaning of his own title—its clinical sense, at any rate. The term “borderline”—as in “borderline schizophrenic”—refers to a state that is not clearly defined. In Mr. Bishop’s two plays, there are no ambiguities. We’re meant to sympathize with Charles Graham because he stands pensively, trying to remember the lyric of a Carole King song. We’re meant to react negatively to his friend Dan, because he makes crude jokes and has unsound views on the defense question. Mr. Bishop has not created characters but positions. Given what his actors have to work with, there’s not a lot that they can do except look tense (the men) or desirable (the women). As Charles, Mr. Smith brings a new kind of facelessness to contemporary malaise. Mr. McCarty, Miss Quinn, and Miss Schlarth all fare somewhat better with the comic stereotypes they play in the second half than with the soap-opera stereotypes of the first; Miss Denmark makes the most of her role as Frank’s unfaithful wife, and Mr. Maruzzo is funny as the streetwise Joey, less daunted by his women’s clothing than the married men around him. But the slip poor Dave has to squeeze into is as phony as the playwright’s initial premise; no one’s worn anything like that for years.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, April 25, 1988