TV Reviews : Nothing Comical in ‘Women and Wallace’

“American Playhouse” is off to a wobbly start this season. Tonight’s show, “Women and Wallace” (at 9 on Channels 28 and 15), is even more grinding and self-conscious than last week’s stodgy opener, the East Coast elitist drama, “Sensibility and Sense.”

What’s happening to “American Playhouse”? These first two productions of the ninth season have been dreary. At least last Wednesday’s play, co-starring Jean Simmons and Elaine Stritch as besieged old leftists, had its moments. Tonight’s play opens with a mother’s suicide and follows her young son’s subsequent efforts to deal with girls in his anguished adolescence.

The play supposedly is a dark comedy but on television, under Don Scardino’s arty direction, it’s merely bleak. Perhaps the major problem is that the playwright, 20-year-old Jonathan Marc Sherman, wrote this semi-autobiographical play when he was 18. Adolescence will out.

Credit the producers with giving youth an opportunity. (The play was a winner at the 1988 Young Playwrights Festival at Playwrights Horizons in New York; coincidentally, it’s also currently on stage at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.) What a break for a juvenile work.

The only way a play like this could work is to go for a black humor. But there’s nothing comical here. The handsome youth is played with a teen-ager’s basic insecurities by Josh Hamilton, who did the play in New York. His dialogue, both directly to the camera and to other characters (most prominently the luminous Joanna Going), is full of posturing, self-protective devices.

At one point he describes his dead mother (whom we saw slitting her throat) as “Sylvia Plath without the talent.” That’s a smart line but not from a grieving son.

At least the youth’s grandmother (nicely portrayed by Joan Copeland) has it right: “A dead mother doesn’t give you carte blanche to screw up,” she tells him. A tip of the cap to playwright Sherman for some belated wisdom and maturity. There’s hope for Sherman. But what about “American Playhouse”?