TV Reviews : Edward Herrmann Punctuates ‘End of a Sentence’

There’s something invitingly participatory about a character talking directly into a camera. As a viewer/companion, you become a confidante to the dramatic monologue. If the single voice is interesting enough, you’ll follow the character anywhere.

That’s the effect of playwright Richard Nelson’s one-character comedy-drama, “The End of a Sentence,” starring Edward Herrmann and airing on KCET Channel 28 at 9 tonight on “American Playhouse.” (It also airs Friday at 9 p.m. on KPBS Channel 15.)

We meet Herrmann’s well-meaning English professor in a bar at Grand Central station as he awaits the arrival of an emigre Polish novelist and dissident whom the professor has personally garnered for a special lecture at his middling university in Upstate New York.

We all had an English professor like Herrmann. He’s idealistic, hoping to prod his apathetic students with a hot radical speaker. “Politics is coming back, you can just feel it,” the professor says over his Guinness stout.

But humiliation and disaster strike in a sequence of events that hilariously suggest the scenario in the movie “Reuben, Reuben,” layered over for those old enough to remember with the carnage strewn about university English departments (notably UC Santa Barbara’s) when a soused Dylan Thomas was a campus guest in the early ‘50s.

What’s wonderful about Herrmann’s performance is how he makes you feel the presence of others around him. Once he gets his guest home and the booze starts to flow, you feel the mask of the professor’s confidence slip away. Mixing drinks in his kitchen, the professor anxiously confides how the Pole just made a pass at the woman he lives with. And it dawns on him why this foreign charlatan only teaches at all-women’s colleges.

This is a bittersweet, piquant look at Academe. And the show, by moving through the course of a day and evening with four locations, slyly gives the single-voice genre a sense of propulsion. David Jones directed.