A Search for Understanding and Love

New York Times. November 8, 1992. By Alvin Klein.

IF "Idioglossia" sounds like a baffling title, hold on. That's just the beginning.

Mark Handley's play at the George Street Playhouse means to probe major things: the mystery of language, the magic of learning, even the meaning of love. More important -- more important? -- Mr. Handley's theme is the freeing of the mind.

How so? It seems that a lifelong recluse, Nell, age 40, communicated only with her twin sister, Ellen, dead 20 years and mummified in an onstage coffin. Hence, idioglossia -- the word for a private or pathological and, in either case, unintelligible form of discourse.

What to do when Nell is discovered? (Don't ask how.) Should she be institutionalized? Or observed in her own habitat, a log cabin where the patterns of an unparalleled life can be scientifically documented.

As a hoped-for restorative, Nell's case is given to Jake, a volatile, burned-out and turned-off iconoclastic psychologist who has been dismissed from the local hospital for shaking an autistic boy. It is T. C., played by Allison Janney, who is resumably the psychiatrist in charge -- the playwright's mind is on things more lofty than details -- who gets Jake over to Nell's cabin. It is T. C. who had to dismiss Jake. And it is T. C. who is in love with Jake.

In what seems like no time at all, which means less than a year according to the playwright's inexact designation and 15 minutes in the real world of theater intermissions, Nell and Jake are communicating with a fierce intelligibility. Jake soon learns what "Ellen in the box" means. Jake and Nell play Romeo and Juliet. Nell makes up a sonnet. Sex follows Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, in the computer room next door, T. C. and Claude, a nomadic linguist-anthropologist, are videotaping Jake and Nell, in a form of legalized voyeurism otherwise known as scientific documentation.

It falls to Claude, a disposable, numbingly naive character (played by Betsy Palmer) who never heard of mnemonic learning devices, to mouth, remorselessly, most of the playwright's platitudes about life's discoveries, the world's wonders and the universe's possibilities, not to mention generic bromides like "You can't not begin things because you're afraid they will end."

The rest of the time, Ms. Palmer gazes glassily at the video monitor, beaming. Claude's decision about her own life is one of the play's mind-boggling resolutions.

In a role that reduces T. C. to jargon spouting, jealousy and other displays of pedantry and pettiness, Ms. Janney, who gave a smashing and sexy performance in "Breaking Up" at Teaneck's American Stage a couple of seasons ago, is here unpardonably shortchanged. Steven Keats appears mystified by all the conflicting things demanded of Jake. After violating professional ethics, the character has to contend with sudden affirmation, a blow to his stereotyped male ego and a renewal of despair.

Darting about and circling her own space with her fingers dancing, emitting strange sounds ('nua,' 'noomba,' 'uji,' 'nosti'), climbing on beams and descending a rope, or just flinging oatmeal, Deanna Deignan creates an image of playfulness and translucence as Nell. On her own terms, the actress radiates instinctive wisdom.

Tom O'Horgan, the director, has fashioned flowing, graceful interludes for Nell and composed exotic background music, for instruments like glass harmonica, nail violin and nose flute, to reproduce the workings of her mind. Forget about Mr. O'Horgan's direction of the three other characters, who register three degrees of staginess or just distress.

Beyond echoes of "Equus" -- the clinician gets a lesson in passion from an assumedly deranged patient -- and other literary, theatrical and cinematic evocations of the superiority and sensitivity of strangeness, Mr. Handley's intended paean to the triumph of the individual's spirit is done in by its own duality. Set up as a real story and inspired by one Mr. Handley read in a magazine, the play has too many gaps to be taken for real. As a tall tale for romantic rebels at heart, it is written too prosaically.

In the end, the concept of idioglossia, the made-up language, remains the sturdiest part of a wobbly work. Mr. Handley, who appears drawn to curious titles, having written such plays as "Moexxv" and "Anabolism," might as well have come up with "Bemuddlement" this time.

"Idioglossia," by Mark Handley, produced by the George Street Playhouse, 9 Livingston Avenue in New Brunswick. Performances through next Sunday. Box office: (908) 246-7717.