Comedy : Dunn Solo Shows Promise for Future

In her past appearances on TV’s “Saturday Night Live,” Nora Dunn gave every indication that she belongs in the tiny band of elite comedic actresses that includes Lily Tomlin, Catherine O’Hara and Whoopi Goldberg. But in her weekend appearance at Cafe Largo in a solo program called “Nobody’s Rib,” she also showed that she’s sorely in need of a director and writer.

Dunn has a fresh demeanor and the kind of economical features that can be bent toward any number of comedic ends. She also has the keen satirist’s instinct for letting her people speak for themselves. This worked particularly well with her three show-biz types, Ashly Ashley, Pat Stevens and Babette, the French starlet.

Ashley (no doubt based on actress Elizabeth Ashley and a number of other husky-voiced show-biz viragoes) has a ravaging self-absorption that works you over like a riptide.

Stevens’ aggressive charm is a plausible, stylish, impeccably dopey by-product of someone to whom the world of modeling is the ne plus ultra of human existence (she takes us on a page-turning tour of the models in a Vogue magazine and worries aloud that too many words are threatening to crowd out the pictures). “Children,” she tells us sweetly, “are our nation’s most precious accessories.”

Babette is looking for the clue to everlasting superstardom. That’s why she prefers to remain a sex kitten--sex goddesses come to bad ends, aging sex kittens merely become fluffy.

Dunn’s celebrity types were well-targeted (except for Babette’s dubious accent) and a welcome sight for anyone who’s wearied of the endless parade of vapid show-biz figures who’re filling up the ‘90s with their self-important chat. But her other figures are more problematic. They include a slow-witted dishwasher with a faintly Slavic accent, named Lou; a fiercely aggressive art-for-art’s sake dabbler named Estelle; a slightly tipsy housewife and mother whose nerves are stretched to the breaking point; and a precocious young girl named Joanne--maybe a latchkey kid--who feels great compassion for TV’s Mr. Rogers because he obviously leads such a shabby, lonely life.

With most of these people you’re not quite sure what Dunn is trying to tell us. With them, satire crosses over into the category of performance art, which is the tag people put on presentations that don’t come to us with a point of view, and don’t have a context other than the one we’re all sitting in together. Because these people are original creations, it’s up to Dunn to let us know what she thinks of them and why they’re important enough for her to play them up.

Are they prototypes or does she prize them for their eccentricity? If it’s the first, they’re not developed enough. If it’s the second, she hasn’t unlocked their humanity (the way Goldberg does, for example, with her black girl who dreams of blond hair).

Dunn would probably do better if we thought we were watching a comedy show. The tone is often comedic, but because a lot of her lines and imagery tend to meander, the tension and snap that comedy requires is missing.

A directorial eye and an editor’s pencil should help Dunn along on what should be a major career. Maybe she’s not in stage shape yet. This is, after all, the first time we’ve seen her since she left “Saturday Night Live.” She was classy enough, incidentally, not to mention the show or the issue (her refusal to appear on the air with Andrew Dice Clay) that led to her departure. From a moral standpoint, the SNL gang had proved beneath her. And as far as her show is concerned, there it stays.