Review of Three One-Act Plays: Riverside Drive Old Saybrook Central Park West (Paperback)

These are not terrific comedies about infidelity. For the long-term Woody Allen fan, they will not reveal a desire on Allen's part to explore significantly new thematic material.

For whatever reason, Allen has in recent years revived his interest in theatrical writing (many years ago he had hits with "Don't Drink The Water" and "Play it Again, Sam"; the short plays "Death" and "God" were included in his collections of New Yorker pieces). There are other (dramatic) plays that have not yet appeared in print - "The Floating Lightbulb" (circa 1980) and "A Secondhand Memory" (2004).

"Central Park West" is the least interesting of the three newer plays included in this handsome paperback. It originally appeared in 1995 on a triple bill called DEATH DEFYING ACTS with one-acts by David Mamet and Elaine May. It anticipates a love-quadrangle scenario Allen would explore more effectively in his film "Deconstructing Harry" (1997) - that of a man leaving his wife not for his long-term mistress but for another, much younger, woman. Of course, the mistress initially thinks she is the one with whom the husband will be running away.

The play is, I guess, meant to be a kind of satire of rich New Yorkers. It doesn't really come off. One must resist temptation to seize upon this line and turn it against its creator -

"You're a failed writer, Howard - judging from the characters you create you shouldn't even be a writer - you should be in the cardboard business."

(For a laugh, and an insight into the pains of a director who must deal with the whims of three playwrights, check out the diary of the director that was published in the New Yorker in 1996.)

WRITER'S BLOCK was presented as a double-bill directed by Allen in 2003. "Riverside Drive", the best play in the book, focuses on a cheating writer who, while waiting to meet his soon-to-be ex-mistress in a secluded spot by the Hudson, is harrassed by a mentally unstable homeless writer. The action goes on to revisit shades of the Martin Landau plot of 'Crimes and Misdemeanors'.

"Old Saybrook" is similiar to "Central Park West" albeit with a post-modern twist. Halfway through this play about cheating couples in Connecticut, we discover these characters are actually characters from an abandoned play by a playwright named Max Krolian ("It's dark in the drawer," explains one character). Krolian joins in on the action to try to figure out an ending to the play.

Product Description
Three delightful one-act plays set in and around New York, in which sophisticated characters confound one another in ways only Woody Allen could imagine

Woody Allen's first dramatic writing published in years, "Riverside Drive," "Old Saybrook," and "Central Park West" are humorous, insightful, and unusually readable plays about infidelity. The characters, archetypal New Yorkers all, start out talking innocently enough, but soon the most unexpected things arise-and the reader enjoys every minute of it (though not all the characters do).

These plays (successfully produced on the New York stage and in regional theaters on the East Coast) dramatize Allen's continuing preoccupation with people who rationalize their actions, hide what they're doing, and inevitably slip into sexual deception-all of it revealed in Allen's quintessentially pell-mell dialogue.

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