TITLE: BLACK COMEDY & WHITE LIARS
AUTHOR: PETER SHAFFER
WHERE: BROADWAY
THE BOTTOM LINE: Little depth is revealed in dated comedies by the author of Equus.
Nothing dates so fast as novelty, and nothing ill becomes a playwright so drastically as having mature peaks contrasted with juvenilia. Thus no one is served, neither writer nor audience, by reviving Peter Shaffer's one-acts about sex, greed and self-deceit. White Liars, the opener, has been rewritten but remains derivative sentimentality about an old East European immigrant barely getting by as a fortune teller on the holiday coast of England. Black Comedy relies on the...
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