Woody Allen at Theater J [3 cents]

Theater J ended its 2004-2005 season with two Woody Allen one-act plays, Central Park West and Riverside Drive.

Riverside Drive has a terrific character, Fred, who is a homeless intellectual loon, who knows everything about everything, but gets information zapped to him by the Empire State Building, and senses all sorts of conspiracies focusing on his vary existence. The rest of Riverside Drive, with Jim the writer who is having an affair with Barbara, who tries to blackmail him when he breaks it off, is too typically Woody Allen to hold my interest. Of course, Fred is probably really Jim's other self, doing the things Jim wishes he could do, and thinking the things Jim is afraid to sink, but when, to keep Barbara from blackmailing Jim, Fred simply throws her into the Hudson ("in twenty minutes, she'll be in the Atlantic Ocean, but if the Hudson flowed the other way, in twenty minutes she would be in Poughkeepsie". Or is it Tarrytown?), it is a bit too much for Jim.

Or is it?

Central Park West, written about ten years ago, is about adultery, and naivite, and insincere profestations of love. Here is everything I liked about Central Park West:










And there you have it.