E-Mail This Article to a Friend Guare to middling Bosoms is worthy of neglect BY IRIS FANGER
	Bosoms and Neglect By John Guare. Directed by Larry Arrick. Set and lighting by Kevin Hardy. With Florence Phillips, April Shawhan, and Victor Warren. At Payomet Performing Arts Center in Truro through August 31.

Who would have thought that a play about two Manhattan neurotics suffering August shrink-withdrawal pains because their doctor has abandoned them for his summer vacation would seem quaint after little more than two decades? Or that the pair’s king-of-the-mountain battle over your therapy versus my analysis would invoke hardly more than yawns and furtive peeks at one’s watch?

John Guare’s quasi-comedy with dark undertones, Bosoms and Neglect, had its premiere in 1979, before the advent of psycho-pharm transformed the psychiatrist’s treatment of depression and the various habits and tics of certain segments of the urban population from the rituals on the couch to a daily regime of pills. Although the themes of the play encompass more complex issues about relationships and the problems thereof, and though psychiatrists are still a visible part of the medical landscape, the reason for this particular revival in the charming tent theater off Route 6 in North Truro remains puzzling. Perhaps Guy Strauss, artistic director of Payomet Performing Arts Center in Truro, thought the annual crowd of psychiatrists visiting their August hideouts in the area might enjoy a blast from the past in Guare’s often witty and observant dialogue. There’s also the producerial bonus of the play’s spartan requirements: three actors and one set. Add one glamorous star — April Shawhan, who has played Blanche DuBois on Broadway — to the mix, plus director Larry Arrick, who comes with an impressive list of credits, Chicago’s Second City and Trinity Rep among them, and you’ve got a deal.

Bosoms and Neglect opens in thirtysomething Deirdre’s apartment, where she’s brought the 40-year-old Scooper, who picked her up in the bookstore around the corner. It seems they know each other, at least by sight, from sharing the same psychiatrist, whom they alternately revere and revile. The patients also share a dependency on books, which surround them like talismans to ward off all evils, along with some deep and dreadful secrets that have driven them to violent breakdowns. The pick-up was an unplanned maneuver because Scooper had plans to run away that very night with his long-time mistress, the wife of his best friend and business partner.

If that’s not enough to trowel on the guilt, Scooper’s blind mother, Henny, the third character in the play’s triumvirate of loony tunes, harbors a health problem that she’s tried to cure with super-size Kotex and invocations addressed to a plastic statue of St. Jude, patron of lost causes. The play begins with a prologue in which she bares her breast to her son, revealing a terrible dripping wound from a long-present breast cancer, and ends in a hospital where Henny, Scooper, and Deirdre are all patients. Along the way, there are lies and whispers of deeds done long ago that continue to rule these fragile lives.

The first act snaps right along, thanks to Shawhan’s energizer bunny of a performance as Deirdre and Victor Warren as a properly whiny-needy Scooper who doesn’t seem to know what’s good for him. The funniest scene, performed with masterful timing, is the one in bed (Manhattan-style, on a sofa bed pulled out in haste), where the cutting of pages of a rare edition of Byron’s poems substitutes for foreplay, complete with writhing and moans. Unfortunately, the tempo drops to slow motion in act two, in the obligatory encounter between Henny and Scooper — primarily because Florence Phillips, as Henny, never stops to listen to her son. Although the character is supposed to be as riddled with her own needs as with cancer and can’t make time for Scooper, we need to see that she hears what he says. Her final monologue, which as written is a show stopper and nearly undoes the datedness of the play, is delivered dead in the water. I was left wondering what Julie Harris, a near-by Cape Cod neighbor who has appeared at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater down the road, would make of the role.

Despite Shawhan’s charisma and the near-perfect casting of Warren, Bosoms plays like lukewarm soda left open too long. Let’s cherish Guare for works with more lasting power, particularly House of Blue Leaves, and leave this one to theater history.