TV Reviews : Show’s Winning Streak Ends With ‘Avenue Z’

“General Motors Playwrights Theatre,” television’s only window exclusively devoted to the premieres of one-act plays, has been on a pretty good roll--up till now. Stephen DiLauro’s “Avenue Z Afternoon” (at 6 and 10 tonight on A&E;) ends the winning streak.

A comedy about a Jewish matron in Brooklyn whose apartment is invaded by Clash, a hapless Puerto Rican burglar, the play is well acted by Anne Meara and Lou Diamond Phillips, but suffers from a deadening predictability.

From the moment the burglar climbs through the woman’s open window, you know how things are going to work out. The playwright lays the play’s blueprint out so quickly--a chatty Jewish mom treating her nervous captor like a wayward son (“have some homemade soup”)--that their dialogue and the action are loud, flat, and repetitive.

The third of this season’s four monthly productions on “Playwrights Theatre” (following the estimable Revolutionary War drama “Hale the Hero” and the father-son drama “Merry Christmas Baby”), “Avenue Z Afternoon” is intended to dramatize how wit and human empathy can overcome an ethnic-generation gap and salvage a deprived and lost soul.

That’s a worthy theme, and Meara’s blowzy matron and Phillips’ nervous gun-wielding burglar are vivid enough. But neither they nor director Burt Brinckerhoff can overcome the shouting and silliness of it all to give the play any credible charm or momentum.