It’s amazing what Woody Allen can still get away with. “Honeymoon Motel,” his contribution to this trio of one-act plays, is truly awful. But some critics (and much of the audience I saw it with) seem to find it hilarious. It starts with a totally arbitrary and implausible premise: a bride and groom enter their honeymoon suite, ready for a night of bliss. Soon members of the wedding party are trooping into the room (best man, bride’s parents, the rabbi), and we quickly learn that the supposed groom is actually the groom’s father, who has run off with his son’s bride at the altar. It’s the pretext for a series of scattershot one-liners pulled from Woody’s bottom drawer of rejects. E.g.: “Freud was a genius. Who else could make an hour into 50 minutes?” The sketch runs less than 50 minutes but feels like hours.
Woody’s misfire is especially unfortunate, because it brings down the whole evening, which until then has been modestly enjoyable. Joel Coen’s curtain-raiser, “The Talking Cure,” is little more than a fragment, but a neatly shaped series of short exchanges between a prison shrink and a recalcitrant inmate, followed by a longer, seemingly unrelated scene in which a married couple spew invective at each other over dinner. The link between them is a little too facile, but Coen’s ear is sharp, and his aim is true.
The best of the three is the middle entry, Elaine May’s “George Is Dead.” Like Allen’s sketch, May starts with a farcical premise: a spoiled Manhattan matron (Marlo Thomas) bursts into the apartment of her former nanny’s daughter to announce that her (Marlo’s) husband has just died on the ski slopes in Aspen. Unlike Allen, however, May turns the gag setup into a corrosively funny portrait of the infantilizing of the upper-class American female. Thomas’ character is so shallow that she can’t mourn; so clueless she doesn’t know how to make funeral arrangements (or even that she needs to make funeral arrangements); and so oblivious that she buries herself in TV sitcoms while the marriage of her reluctant host crumbles before her (averted) eyes. It’s harrowing and hilarious.