STAGE REVIEW : Al Pacino Is the Cream in ‘Chinese Coffee’

Many movie stars give lip service to the theater, but Al Pacino puts his mania where his mouth is.

The wired Bronx kid with the 1,000-year-old eyes was practically adopted by Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. And, ever since his 1968 off-Broadway debut in “The Indian Wants the Bronx,” he has bounced back often--though never often enough for some of us--to have his idiosyncratic way with the classics and to create his own classic characters in contemporary plays by David Mamet and David Rabe.

That said, “Chinese Coffee,” the second half of a brief unofficial Al Pacino Repertory Season at Circle in the Square, is an extremely minor affair.

A long one-act by a little-known and very lucky playwright named Ira Lewis, it’s basically a two-man character study--an artificial acting exercise whose appeal depends almost exclusively on one’s desire to watch such a fascinating actor chew on such an undeveloped character and make us pay attention, which, somehow, he does.

Unlike the elaborate production around “Salome” (the other evening in Pacino’s $50-a-show fund-raising benefit for the theater), this one is spare and simple. OK, skimpy. Zack Brown, who designed the huge bronze set for “Salome,” now gives us a run-down loft in Lower Manhattan--tiny kitchen, living room and photographer’s studio--decorated in barren, aging graduate-student style.

The flat belongs to Jacob (Charles Cioffi), a theatrical photographer without clients and a friend of Pacino’s Harry, a fired restaurant doorman who considers himself a novelist. Both are middle-aged Jewish underachievers, well-read men, armed with blames and excuses for their failures. Harry, tired of being poor and afraid of getting old, awaits Jacob’s opinion of his novel about their lives. Jacob, jealous of the book and afraid to lose his friend to success, calls Harry a phony who stole his life for profit.

And that’s pretty much it in Arvin Brown’s modest production. Harry bangs on Jacob’s door in the middle of a cold February night. Jacob, awake and fully dressed, reluctantly lets in Harry, a wasted, pale, nervous guy in a rumbled, old black raincoat and $1.50 in his pocket. They squabble, talk about their lost women and make Tolstoy references. Harry, who is 46, laments, “Even Henry Miller had a following by 44.”

How forced and contrived is the dialogue? Try Jacob to Harry: “You’re hysterical. Even your dandruff is doing dances.” Or Harry to Jacob: “I am literally a thing of threads and patches. I have a coat without cachet.”

How Pacino can make us smile at such a line is a gift--surely part of his dogged ability to infuse not-pretty New York characters with a playful complexity. He pushes his fingers through his disheveled hair, rubs his big, tired face and, before long, we realize we almost believe his evolution from shaking bum to alienated intellectual to confident novelist with a future.

Cioffi has less to do as Jacob and he does less with it, though not without rocking the surface stability of his character a bit. The title, for those who need to know, refers to Harry’s discarded habit of sitting in Chinatown coffee shops and romanticizing his poverty by thinking he is spiritually above mere striving New Yorkers.

This revelation is less significant than the insight Jacob has about Harry’s novel--that is, a book about “two colossal and messy bores” with “no end to their verbal pretensions.” As Jacob says, “You’re not going to drum up any interest in these guys.” Pacino aside, Jacob’s dead right.