HIDE AND SEEK.(Sly Fox)(Sarah, Sarah)(Theater Review)

Volpone, whom Ben Jonson claimed to have invented in five weeks in 1606, is the kind of con man who would steal your stove, then come back for the smoke. A harbinger of the rise of both capitalism and individualism, he has proved to be one of the theatre's most durable messengers of a third ism: cynicism. For Volpone, a man who can't see a belt without hitting below it, Homo sapiens is Homo sap. Pretending to be heirless and at death's door, he uses the legend of his wealth to extort all sorts of capital from the greedy souls around him. A connoisseur of the craven, he gets a sadistic thrill not just from grand larceny but from grand humiliation: he doesn't want wealth alone; he wants to watch its power corrupt.

In our current climate of avarice, the director Arthur Penn and the playwright Larry Gelbart decided to crank up their 1976 Broadway fun machine "Sly Fox," based on "Volpone" (at the Barrymore), to see if it would still fly. They installed a new comic engine--the puckish Richard Dreyfuss as Foxwell J. Sly--and several new sparkplugs, including Bronson Pinchot as Lawyer Craven, Peter Scolari as the Chief of Police, and Professor Irwin Corey as the Court Clerk. Nonetheless, the show takes some time to get airborne. The first and most glaring impediment to liftoff is the miscasting of Eric Stoltz as Simon Able, Sly's sidekick and shill. Stoltz is a good actor who has wandered into the wrong play. Handsome, suave, and genial, he hasn't a whiff of mischief about him. Dreyfuss's comic attack is balls-out; Stoltz's is entirely balls-in. With such a bland partner in crime, the capering Dreyfuss doesn't have enough to play against, and without traction, especially in Act I, he can't build sufficient momentum. The second obstacle is the narrative drag of the play itself. Set in San Francisco around the period of the gold rush, most of the first act takes place in Sly's bedroom, as he lies behind the curtains of his fourposter bed and Simon Able ushers the suckers in and out. To find favor in Sly's will, a lawyer offers Sly stolen property, a father disowns his son, and, most amusingly, a jealous husband (the droll, bug-eyed Bob Dishy, reprising his role as Mr. Truckle) offers up his voluptuous, pious wife (Elizabeth Berkley). All three ante up in hopes of winning the same prize: the treasure chest that lies at the foot of Sly's bed. "It serves the delightful double purpose of enriching me while depriving someone else," Sly observes of his stash of gold. But no number of deft one-liners--"My boy, you could drill into Abner Truckle for a year and never strike decent"--can quite chip away at the weight of visual and structural repetition: the three characters enter through the same door, ask more or less the same question about Sly's will, and exit having reached more or less the same bargain. It isn't until a policeman finds Sly with his head up Mrs. Truckle's skirt as she lights a candle to give thanks for his miraculous recovery that the show suddenly shifts into a looser, giddier, and more surreal rhythm. "I'm an innocent man!" Sly yells above the tumult at the end of the act, as he and Able are hauled off to jail on what appears to be a rape charge. "If I'm not, may this entire city fall to the ground." There is an ominous rumble and the cast lurches: this is meant to signal the San Francisco earthquake, but it's really the sight of Gelbart's comedy taking off.

In Act II, burlesque rules. In a saloon turned courtroom, the players run wild. Released from the fetters of Sly's masquerade ("too weak" to take the stand, Sly appears in court only as a lump in a bed that is wheeled in), Dreyfuss dons whiskers and long hair--looking for all the world like Yosemite Sam--to double as the Honorable Thunder Bastardson. Alternately gnawing his gavel and banging it, he swaggers around the stage spouting ludicrous commands ("I object to your interruption and my objection is sustained!") and lewd innuendos ("They don't call me the 'Hangin' Judge' just because I'm well built!"). As the ...