1812's "Evening Without Woody Allen'

"I want a woman who's mentally stimulating, and I'm willing to pay for it!" explains the husband who pays a scholarly prostitute for erudite conversation because his own wife has lost her intellectual charms.

That was Woody Allen in his 1974 New Yorker short story, The Whore of Mensa, back when he was not yet 40 and bursting with inventive parodies of literary and popular clichés. Fans of Allen's "'70s films, like Take the Money and Run and Bananas, reveled in his outrageously original images as seen through the prism of highbrows and social outcasts (a cellist in a high school marching band, a poor schnook chasing his slippery frozen dinner around his kitchen floor, a newlywed couple performing sex on "Wide World of Sports") that evoked laughter even though Allen tended to dwell a bit too long and self-congratulatorily on each visual inspiration.

But at that same time, Allen was composing much more disciplined humorous essays and short stories for The New Yorker and other magazines. There, dealing in words rather than images, he was fully in control of his medium, producing a more rigorous brand of nonsense whose level of sophistication far transcended the cheerful amateurishness of his early films.

(Allen's later films suffer from the opposite problem: They're professionally directed, acted and edited but devoid of new ideas or any sense of spontaneity. And of course they're not funny, either.)

Jennifer Childs, the artistic director of 1812 Productions, possesses a good ear for comic material, so it shouldn't surprise us that The Whore of Mensa and four other Allen stories from the "'70s attracted her attention. Reading these stories, she writes in the program for An Evening Without Woody Allen, makes you laugh out loud. So why shouldn't performing them before an audience produce the same effect?

To be sure, the evening's opening Whore of Mensa skit— with Dan Hodge as the intellectually horny customer and Charlotte Ford as a scrawny college hooker faking Proust and Hegel for his pleasure— was very funny indeed. But the 80-minute program soon grew tiresome and repetitious, for several reasons.

For one thing, Woody Allen's stories are meant to be read, not acted. When you read printed pages, you must engage your brain by forming abstract symbols into words and then mind-images. When a Woody Allen essay like A Look at Organized Crime or A Brief Yet Helpful Guide to Civil Disobedience is performed, you're relegated to the role of passive observer. It's sort of like dramatizing Browning's My Last Duchess, or Frost's Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening: Some things are best left to the imagination.

For another, Allen in the '70s possessed a limited arsenal of schticks, and consequently his work was best consumed in small portions, lest they repeat on you. Watching five skits in a row about, say, novelizing a Three Stooges movie or time-tripping Madame Bovary into 20th-Century Manhattan is like eating five cream puffs in succession. When your three performers (Hodge, Ford and Thomas E. Shotkin) are essentially reciting the texts of the stories verbatim, the fare is diluted to thin gruel indeed.

For another, Allen's '70s pieces lost their novelty long ago. A line like, "The problem with a hunger strike is that after seven days you can get quite hungry," may have served as a refreshing riposte to the earnest age of protest demonstrations; today it's a matter of, "Been there, done that."

These Woody Allen stories were very funny once upon a time. They still can be, if read to yourself or a friend in the proper mood. But for the most part they wither in the glare of the footlights.♦


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