What a peculiar experience this one was. A touching little play about a lonely writer hallucinating as he lay dying in a flop-house, given an excellent performance by Jim Kisicki in the title role supported by Joe Lauck, Richard Halverson, Harper Jane McAdoo and your humble correspondent, this one was done in by a bone-headed PR campaign. The play had achieved something of cult status on the West Coast with Victor Buono in the title role. And had we staged the thing in the Brooks for a limited audience, it may have done the sort of business Indulgences in the Louisville Harem was to garner on that stage, but alas it was put on the yawning 77th street stage and billed as a zany Marx-Brothers romp. I can't begin to tell you how much the audiences disliked it. Not because it was a bad production, but because their expectations were all wrong.

And what a pity. It should have been a tour-de-force for us all. Jim Kisicki was superb, the design of the seedy hotel room was excellent and beautifully executed, the supporting cast terrific. As for me, I played all the Marx Brothers and even a German Director all of whom emerged from under the bed--I had something like 58 costume changes under there thanks to a hole in the wall under the headboard and the amazingly skilled Estelle Painter. I even had to learn to ride a unicycle (if you look closely at the grainy photo above-left, you can see me wheeling around on a unicycle as Harpo with a blow-up sex doll on my shoulders).

By the way, I learned that the key to Groucho's distinctive vocal pattern was that the Jewish Marx family was raised in an Irish neighborhood. The pronunciation was decidedly New York Jewish, the melody-line Irish--fascinating.