STAGE REVIEW : ‘Kingfish’ Arrives With Teeth Intact

Down, Kingfish. Don’t kill the critics. There’s a good boy.

We are discussing Marlane Meyer’s “Kingfish,” a comedy of perception. First seen at the Los Angeles Theatre Center two seasons ago, it arrived Thursday night at Joseph Papp’s Public Group Theater, to negative reviews.

“Self-conscious absurdism,” said the New York Times. “An old dog trying to learn new tricks,” said Newsday.

Nonsense. “Kingfish” is a wonderful play. Unless, of course, it merely coincides with this reviewer’s private obsessions. How would the world look if we could get above ourselves?

The very question of the play. It is Meyer’s opinion that in the world of the human mind, there is very little there. Things are what we agree to call them and we make some bizarre agreements, from which real-world consequences flow, and sometimes blood as well.

Rather a timely point for a play to make as the truths of the Cold War get revised. “Kingfish” is not, however, a preachment. It’s a shaggy-dog story, or rather a shaggy-box story.

Again Buck Henry plays, to fussy perfection, a lonely bachelor whose best friend in the whole world is a Doberman named Kingfish. All that we see is a black box about the size of a television set with a green slash on one end for teeth, but to Henry it’s a true killer-dog, and the play demonstrates how such a fiction can become a fact when it is to the interest of enough people to buy into it.

“Harvey” made the same point in another way, and, “Kingfish” offers some of the same theatrical fun, updated to the style of the 1980s, for those not so on their high horse that they can’t see it. Baleful as it sounds, the play is a comedy, a point not forgotten by David Schweizer’s cast, including David Schweizer.

Once more he perches above the black-box set on a light bridge, reading aloud the stage directions while a colleague, Arthur Hanket, throws Kingfish his barks and growls.

“Why?” somebody wanted to know at intermission. Because it works. Also, I imagine, to stress the idea that “Kingfish” is a story about the boxes that people perform their lives in. What’s on-the-nose about this off-the-wall story is the sense that its characters, like Chekhov characters, are stuck in separate mental compartments, although nominally sharing the same plot. They seem to have signed a mutual nonaggression pact: I won’t test your reality if you don’t test mine.

When someone does test someone else’s reality--when it is suggested that perhaps Kingfish is only a barking box--someone has to pay for his impertinence. Truth in “Kingfish” is a punishable offense.

Abstract as it may sound, Meyer’s characters do live in their version of the real world. Jacque Lynn Colton is again the randy practical nurse. Tony Abatemarco is the dog trainer ( real dogs). Barry Sherman is the hustler--less eerie than the late Merritt Buttrick at LATC, but just as hysterical. Kevin O’Rourke is the CIA agent--Ollie North, where Sam Anderson gave us John Wayne at LATC.

Henry takes the last two men to live with him, as his “sons.” (Another lietmotif of the play is “family.”) Will the boys inherit his money, or will Colton and Abatemarco, or will Kingfish? Or will he die at all? The situation is clear-cut and the ending not to be taken literally. But we get the message. Ideas in this play don’t just have legs. They have teeth.