Some Prominent Playwrights from the Archives

BUFFALO GAL
by A. R. Gurney
Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters
2 September 2008

Well, the 2008-09 season has opened!  Seemed early to me—Labor Day hadn’t even come and gone yet—but Primary Stages, one of our longer-running Off-Broadway companies (founded in 1984), started its program on 22 July 2008 with A. R. Gurney’s Buffalo Gal. 

The production had its press opening on 5 August, but its scheduled closing on 30 August was still earlier than most other companies’ initial productions.  (I’m also subscribing to MCC, whose first show doesn’t even open until 10 September; Primary Stages’ next production starts on 30 September.)  What’s next—Christmas starting before Thanksgiving?

Oh, wait.  It already does.  Never mind. 

Okay, enough silliness.  My friend Diana and I went to 59E59 Theaters, the Eastside space in which Primary Stages is working, to see Buffalo Gal on Thursday, 21 August, and it was an excellent theater evening.  Primary Stages is presenting its season in Theater A on the ground floor at 59E59, a 185-seat proscenium house and the complex’s largest space.

It’s not a great play—probably won’t go down in the canon of theater literature as a significant play—but it works on stage and was very enjoyable.  It was also a relief.  As I said to Diana as we were leaving, it’s been a long time since I haven’t left a theater either disappointed or worse. 

(I also let slip the hope that this bodes well for the season, but as soon as I said that, I remembered back to September 2004 when we saw what I thought was a wonderful production of two Ionesco one-acts—The Bald Soprano and The Lesson at the Atlantic Theater Company; see my 4 October 2004 report on Rick On Theater—after which the season went precipitously downhill.  Now I’m afraid I’ve jinxed this season!)

I’ve never been the fan of Gurney (with the exception of 1995’s Sylvia) that I have been of John Guare or Lanford Wilson, say, but he’s a solid playwright—and he’s been at it for so long that he can do it with his eyes closed, I’m sure, and still come out with a creditable script.  This may be a case of that to an extent—plus the fact that he’s dealing here with his own, and I assume beloved, field of endeavor: The Theater. 

Of course, he’s also writing about his main subject, the one he’s devoted his career to: the American WASP—and for good measure, he’s thrown in Chekhov, possibly every theater person’s most favorite playwright next to Shakespeare, and the city of Buffalo, where Gurney, like his leading lady, was born.  [A. R. “Pete” Gurney died at 86 on 13 June 2017.]  In an interview, Gurney said, “I’ve always loved the city of Buffalo and I wanted to write about it.”  Now he has.

So, Theater, WASPs, Chekhov, and Buffalo.  How could he miss?  Well, it’s not as if there aren’t problems with the script—not, that is to specify, the production—and so, I’ll dispense with those cavils tout de suite so as to get past them.  It’s not that they aren’t significant—in another play, they’d have scuttled the whole megillah (and I ain’t talkin’ about the gorilla, neither)—but Gurney, the cast, and director Mark Lamos pull it off smoothly.

I guess, since this is a pretty new play—it premièred at Williamstown in 2000 and had a regular run in . . . guess where!  Buffalo, in 2002—I should give you all a run-down of the plot and all. 

Buffalo Gal (and, yes, the song of that title does play during the show) is a sort of backstage dramedy.  Actually, to be precise, it’s an on-stage-before-rehearsals-start dramedy, but as far as sub-genres go, that’s the same thing.  It’s about actors, directors, producers, stage managers, costumes, sets, props, acting . . . and the stage vs. Hollywood (in this case, TV). 

In the interview, Gurney doesn’t suggest that he chose Chekhov for his model for this reason, but the Russian may be one of Western theater’s most “theatrical” playwrights.  Among all the modern dramatists, he’s one of the few who’ve had no success in films.  (1994’s Vanya on 42nd Street by Louis Malle and David Mamet comes closest.  I always wondered if Robert Altman’s 1978 film A Wedding was inspired by the Chekhov short story, but I’ve never found any confirmation of that suspicion.) 

Ibsen hasn’t done so well (both writers, of course, have had videos of stage productions or, in the case of A Doll’s House, a wonderful live TV production back in the ’50s), but all of Shaw’s major plays were turned into movies—and Pygmalion, of course, got double treatment: stage play-movie-stage musical-movie musical. 

But Chekhov, outside of Russia, has never transferred, yet his plays are considered challenges for actors and directors, loved by theater companies and, presumably, audiences.  I would guess that among actors—and maybe playwrights, too—the most beloved stage piece is The Seagull.  It’s all about us, after all.  But Cherry Orchard, the play at the heart of Buffalo Gal, is about coming home, and that’s what Gurney wrote about in his play. 

Amanda, the main character, even tries to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald on the subject, saying, “Americans always want to be back somewhere.  Something like that, only he said it better.”  (I wondered why no one came back with Thomas Wolfe’s admonishment about home—that you can’t go there again.)  The parallels Gurney constructs, though, are almost too obvious—and that’s one of the complaints I have.

Amanda (Susan Sullivan, whose professional life somewhat parallels Amanda’s), is a successful and famous TV star who’s returning home to Buffalo, where she grew up and started out on the local stage, to play Madam Ranevskaya in the production of Cherry Orchard staged by a rising local rep company.  Her career, mostly because her age is approaching late-middle, has hit a slow point and she’s hoping a stage success will give her a boost. 

The director, Jackie (Jennifer Regan), in turn, hopes that Amanda’s stardom will attract audiences, critics, and contributors to her still-new theater, and that, on the heels of this success (she’s even anticipating a transfer to New York), she can really bring quality theater to Buffalo again.  (It’s not in the script, but the Studio Arena Theatre, Buffalo’s long-time, high-rep regional company went dark earlier this year.  One of its better-known successes was sending Tennessee Williams’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale to Broadway in 1976.) 

The casting of Amanda as Ranevskaya is too perfect: on her way in from the airport, the actress—who’s arrived a day before the rest of the cast to get a feel for the theater—makes the driver from the theater take the long way to by-pass the freeway and to make a detour to her grandmother’s old house.  Amanda grew up there, playing on the veranda (“Amanda on the veranda,” grandma used to say), and now . . . can you all guess?—it’s for sale.  (There’s no cherry orchard at the old house, but there was an apple tree!) 

Of course, Hollywood keeps getting in the way.  Even before Amanda shows up, the director and her staff have been on the phone with Amanda’s agent to get the signed contract.  The agent is apparently delaying—he doesn’t even approve of the whole venture; he’s pushing a trashy sit-com on Fox in which Amanda would play a sort of trash-talking Estelle Getty grandmother (heavens!) role.  He’s raising all kinds of objections, including to the clause that guarantees Jackie a role in the potential transfer to New York if the show is successful. 

Amanda herself is afraid she won’t be able to learn the lines for a stage performance again; in Hollywood, she reminds everyone, you only get pieces of the dialogue at a time, and even then you don’t have to say the words exactly as long as you get the sense right.  She’s had some failed marriages and a daughter with problems, and she needs money to care for her.  The Fox show is lucrative, but insulting and demeaning; however, the producers keep upping the ante and enhancing her role with each offer, relayed by the agent from the coast. 

But before the company can begin to worry about Amanda bolting for TV again, they learn that the leading man, who was to play Leonid, Ranevskaya’s brother, had dropped out.  He and Amanda had worked together before—it’s one of the reasons she wants to do the play—but he’s immediately replaced with a local star, James Johnson (Dathan B. Williams), whom Amanda demands to meet. 

“James” turns out to be “Jimmy” Johnson, Amanda realizes suddenly—formerly one of the boys in her acting classes in Buffalo; he’s also African-American—the theater practices “nontraditional casting”—and Amanda quips, “The 19th-century land-owning Russian lady just discovers she has a black brother.”  

Finally, Amanda gets a phone message from a Dr. Dan Robbins, but she doesn’t recognize the name until a staffer calls the local dentist back and discovers he used to be Danny Ruben (Mark Blum)—her first love and the boy who got her into theater back in high school.  (They wrote and put on a musical—he sends along a CD of them singing the signature song, “Say When,” which is played over the theater’s sound system for all of the assembled characters to hear.  This is something else I’ll address in a moment.)

Among the other clichés are an ASM, Debbie (Carmen M. Herlihy), who’s a theater student conversant with every theater-history factoid you could imagine; and an assistant director, Roy (James Waterston), who admits he’s in theater because he just loves the words.  (His parents are both deaf; at home, communication is all signs.)

I won’t be a spoiler this time and tell you how things turn out—the play is too good as a theater piece, even if it’s not top-level dramatic lit—but I will say that the drama turns on whether Amanda will do the play or not, or whether she goes back to L.A. to do the sit-com (which, in another twist of coincidence, starts taping in the middle of the play’s run—that is, she can’t do both, wouldn’t ya know). 

There’s also the question of whether she’ll throw it all over to stay in Buffalo with her lost love, Dan, whose wife may be leaving him because he’s never really stopped loving Amanda (or, as we might suppose, the image of Amanda, the now-famous Hollywood actress).

All of the characters say too much.  I don’t mean they talk too much, but they say too much.  Debbie, of course, is a chatterer, so I don’t mean her—that’s her character and cliché though it may be, it’s believable.  But everyone else is constantly revealing the most private, intimate things to people who are virtually total strangers.  This is especially true of Amanda—who tells everyone about her daughter’s emotional problems, her money troubles, her failed marriages.  

She acknowledges she has a granddaughter by her unmarried daughter (though she specifies that that little fact—the grandmother part, not the unwed-mother part!—must not appear in her program bio) and finally, while her old boyfriend is trying to convince her to run away with him, she acknowledges that he had gotten her pregnant when they were teens and she had run away to have a secret abortion in Puerto Rico.  (The two are ostensibly alone on stage, but there’s no privacy with techies in the booth and others in the wings and off-stage offices.) 

Why she doesn’t just go on Oprah and reveal all, I don’t know—or write a lucrative tell-all book.  That would solve her money problems, I’d imagine!  Much of the drama and some of the plot rests on these revelations, but, my God!, aren’t some things just private?  Except for Dan (James/Jimmy has left the theater by this time), the actress has never met any of these people.  Remember, Amanda isn’t out of the YouTube and Facebook generation—she hasn’t grown up with her life on the ’Net; she’s a “lady” of a “certain age.”  Yeah, I know, that’s an anachronism . . . but puh-leeeze . . . . 

I don’t think I’ve caught all the contrivances and coincidences Gurney weaves into his plot, but I think you get the idea—it’s a little too convenient to be believed.  The parallels with Cherry Orchard, the Hollywood-vs.-stage conflict, the going-home sentimentality—it’s all a little too hard to credit.  If it weren’t a master craftsman like Gurney, with a terrific cast and sure-handed director, it would have fallen apart in the first scene.

So, that gets me to the acting (and, less obviously, the directing—since Lamos’s work was too subtle in this case to be clearly discernable). 

Make no mistake, this is a star vehicle—or the Off-Broadway equivalent of one.  Amanda is the main character and is on stage most of the play.  Nonetheless, the company worked as an ensemble, even though Susan Sullivan was also the best-known member of the cast by far.  [With a long, successful career in television, Sullivan would probably become most recognized for her portrayal of Martha Rodgers on Castle (2009–2016), the ABC crime-comedy-drama series.]  (James Waterston is the son of Sam Waterston, but in his own right, he’s not very well known yet.) 

The ensembleness of the cast was the clearest benefit of Lamos’s directing—that and the casting itself, certainly.  (Gurney apparently had a hand in casting Sullivan as Amanda—he promoted her for the role.)  Even despite the excesses of Gurney’s script, all the actors created believable characters and convincing circumstances.  It might be hard to believe me now, but while I was watching the play unfold, even as I asked myself from time to time if Amanda should really be telling everyone her private details so readily, I never actually doubted that that was what was going on in this set of lives.  (The jokes, by the way—it is a “dramedy,” as I said before—were not so predictable, though many were “theater jokes.”  I had no problem chuckling away, even guffawing occasionally.) 

It had to be Sullivan, however, who took the prize for making this all work as well as it did.  (The Times gave the production a near-rave—and also ran a feature on Sullivan about a week later—though other New York papers were less enthusiastic.  I admit, because of so many previous differences with Ben Brantley’s criticism, I had trepidations about the show before I went; the review came out two weeks before I saw the play.) 

I’m not sure how they all managed to pull this trick off, but if I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that all the actors simply behaved as if they believed every moment of Gurney’s script.  They never hesitated or flinched, and they didn’t try to run over the less credible bits.  Like con artists, I guess, if actors make as if they believe what they’re doing, the audience—ahem, “marks”—will, too.  I don’t know if there’s psychological justification for that assertion, but it seems true. 

I also assume that Lamos had a hand in this, since every cast member was doing the same level of work—Sullivan’s efforts were obviously greater, but they were all doing the same quality, even if she was doing more quantity. 

[This report was written before I included the review round-up that’s now standard for ROT.  The Times review was Ben Brantley, “Stranger in Newly Strange Lands: Home and Theater,” 6 Aug. 2008; the feature on Sullivan was Patricia Cohen, “Stage Role Close to Home for a Former TV Star,” 11 Aug. 2008.  Other New York City reviews were: Joe Dziemianowicz, “Susan Sullivan shines in ‘Buffalo Gal,’” Daily News 6 Aug. 2008; Frank Scheck, “Star’s Return Sheds Little Theatrical Light,” New York Post 11 Aug. 2008; Michael Feingold, “Hair’s Central Park Revival Still Shines With Youthful Energy; Buffalo Gal Skillfully Reworks Chekhov, “ Village Voice 12 Aug. 2008; and Marilyn Stasio, “Off Broadway: Buffalo Gal,” Variety 6 Aug. 2008.]

*  *  *  *
A BODY OF WATER
by Lee Blessing
Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters
10 December 2008

My friend Diana and I saw the second show at Primary Stages, Lee Blessing’s A Body of Water, on Friday, 17 October 2008.  Charles Isherwood, whose New York Times review of Body of Water appeared two days before we went to 59E59 to see the performance, playing in Theater A, the large proscenium space on the first floor, was decidedly negative, which didn’t bode well.  (I have always had disagreements with the Times’s principal theater critic, Ben Brantley, but most of the time I have found that Isherwood’s judgment aligns with mine.) 

Primary Stages’ publicity summarized the plot of Body thus: “Avis and Moss awake one morning in a house set in the forested hills above a picturesque body of water.  The weather’s great, the view’s magnificent.  However, neither of them seems to know whose house this is or who they are.  Will a stranger at their doorstep be able to help?”  It suggested that Blessing was going to “explore” who we are without our memories. 

Neither Diana nor I, however, could say what the hell Blessing was up to; it was an overextended—and ultimately enervating—gimmick.  Isherwood called the play a “sputtering drama” and “ultimately forgettable” and recommended that Blessing put the pieces of his puzzle “back in the box.”  He may have been a little harsh in his specifics, but his overall evaluation of the play was, unhappily, on the nose.  In fact, my impression was that Blessing had dreamed up a concept and then wrote a play to fit the circumstances.  In fact, here’s what he said in an interview about the play’s “inspiration”:

I woke up one morning, and this idea had suddenly struck me.  You know, what if a couple of people like me woke up and didn’t know who they were?  It developed from there.  Some plays begin with characters, some plays begin with locations, and a play like this simply begins with a premise.

Well, I don’t think the play ever “developed from there.”  Blessing never came up with anything to say with, through, or about the situation or the characters he invented.  When asked what the theme of the play is, he talked all around the question but never really answered it, sounding to me like someone who didn’t have the answer. 

That stranger at the doorstep, named Wren (yes, like the bird; it’s a kind of running joke through the play—”Avis,” as she notes, means bird in Latin—but not a good enough one to recapitulate), may or may not be Avis and Moss’s daughter, and she basically manipulates them by revealing each morning when they awake with no memories of the previous day what she wants them to know, which may or may not be true. 

The problem here is not that Wren may be manipulating Avis and Moss, but Blessing is manipulating us.  And I hate it when a playwright manipulates me.  I don’t like it when Pinter does it, and he’s a lot better at it than Blessing.  Besides, Pinter generally has something to say by way of his manipulation; I’m not at all convinced Blessing does.

I don’t see the value in going in to a detailed description of this production of what I deem a phony drama—it pretends to have something on its mind, but doesn’t (or I’m too dumb to get it).  I will say that the acting was fine (Christine Lahti was Avis and Michael Cristofer, who is the playwright of 1977’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Shadow Box, was Moss) as far as the script allowed, and the direction, by Maria Mileaf, was competent given that same proviso. 

The problem wasn’t the production; it’s the script.  Blessing isn’t a writer I’ve followed much, though I enjoyed Chesapeake back in 1999, but here, for my dough, he failed.  (Come to think of it, Chesapeake’s a play with a gimmick at the center, too.  Mark-Linn Baker played a man who is, in truth, the reincarnated pet Chesapeake Bay retriever he had disastrously tried to kidnap.  They died together in the attempt, and Baker came back as the dog in human form!  But that, at least, was a little different, and Blessing had a point to make about free expression, artistic freedom, and right-wing demagoguery.)

*  *  *  *
THE THIRD STORY
by Charles Busch
MCC Theater, Lucille Lortel Theatre
28 February 2009 

Charles Busch’s The Third Story is a play about storytelling—mostly the Hollywood variety.  Busch has interwoven four stories about twins and mothers-and-sons in his play which had its New York première as part of the MCC Theater’s 2008-09 season at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.  (It had its world première last fall at La Jolla, which commissioned the play.) 

Diana, my frequent theater partner, and I went into Greenwich Village on Friday, 27 February 2009, to see the production, starring Kathleen Turner (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and Busch himself (in several female roles), which was a replacement for a new Neil LaBute play MCC had originally intended to present, The Break of Noon. 

The theater, which has last season’s reasons to be pretty by LaBute about to open on Broadway, didn’t want another LaBute play to compete with this commercial debut, the playwright’s first on Broadway.  I’m no great fan of LaBute, but I’m not sure we got the better of this deal. 

I’m not really a big fan of Busch, either, so that may color my feelings some.  Not that I have any objection to Busch’s work; it just never seems more than mildly amusing to me.  In The Third Story, for instance, he’s composed a sort of showcase for virtuosic character acting, but it’s a pretty shallow exercise for the cast.  They get to display some Thespian pyrotechnics, especially Busch and Scott Parkinson, but there’s no depth to any of it. 

Busch’s playwriting is of the same vein, I’d say.  He includes a “Playwright’s Note” in the program which is a mini-essay on storytelling, especially in his family (some of the autobiography he reveals there shows up now and then in Story’s plot . . . er, plots). 

He also reveals that he started this script off as the story of a queen of crime, a sort of Ma Barker with fashion sense (she likes designer clothes!) and then rediscovered a sci-fi play he’d written in the ’90s about a “frosty lady scientist who creates a clone” and decided to combine the two. 

But that wasn’t enough for Busch, so he invented a Russian fairy tale and folded that in, too.  To lace these together, he created the screenwriter and her son who are writing the film script that encompasses these plots—four stories in all.  (The play’s title refers to an axiom the screenwriter posits that the first two drafts of a script only sketch out the characters and plot outlines, but in the third draft, the story comes together.) 

As I reckon, these were all supposed to interlace with one another, covering similar themes and plot elements, even using some of the same lines.  The difficulty I had, however, was that there were too many balls bouncing in the air for me to keep track of them all and keep them all connected to one another. 

At the same time, since all four stories were dealing with the same basic ideas, everything important got repeated four times (and more—several of the characters also tell stories themselves).  Since none of these ideas was especially profound (at least not in my opinion), that was overkill.  At two hours, Story felt very long; several members of the audience left at intermission and at least one pair walked up the aisle during the second act. 

It seems that this season a lot of the plays I’ve seen had the same fundamental fault: they were insubstantial.  Some also had dramaturgical problems as well, but even the ones that were well structured didn’t have much to say.

I’ll briefly mention some of the performances, since that’s really all there was on offer.  (The tech production was perfectly adequate—and unremarkable.) 

Busch, aside from his storytelling focus, is obsessed with old movies—especially cheesy old movies.  (That’s been a focus of his scripts since the start, whether they were travesties of ’50s teen romps like Psycho Beach Party or horror flicks like Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, or genre flicks of the ’30s and ’40s.)  Here he’s used the gangster films of the ’30s and a ’50s/’60s B sci-fi movie. 

Busch got to display his acting talents as Queenie Bartlett, mob queen, and Baba Yaga, an old crone (think Maria Ouspenskaya on ugly pills) in the Russian fairy story.  (He also played Queenie’s clone, which, I admit, was a pretty funny performance.  Imagine a Bizarro Joan Crawford.  But it was no heftier than a Carol Burnett sketch.) 

Busch has done this kind of thing so often, it’s close to being effortless—and I’m no longer sure what the point of his doing it is.  I mean, is it outrageous anymore for a guy to play a woman.  It’s been on Broadway, for Pete’s sake (M Butterfly, 1988; Victor/Victoria, 1995; Hairspray, 2002); how much more mainstream can you get? 

I can’t say it made the play any funnier knowing that Queenie and Baba Yaga were men in drag than if they had been played by a woman, or by an actor whose gender we didn’t know.  (That’s probably not fair—I didn’t find the play all that funny to start with.)

Kathleen Turner played Peg, the screenwriter, with much the same force and intestinal strength she used for Martha in Virginia Woolf (2005).  (Turner injured her knee a week or so before I saw the performance and almost had to drop out of the show, but she was performing by then with a cane and what looked like a brace hidden in her costume.  It just looked like part of the character’s bio that she was a little lame—after all, Peg goes back to the Hollywood of the silents!) 

The part really doesn’t deserve Turner’s strength: the play’s too slight for the force she emits on stage.  I don’t mean she overplayed the part; in fact, she did a perfect job of portraying this somewhat selfish, remote woman who has all but alienated her son (and sometime writing partner).  Turner’s whiskey voice, which worked so well for Martha, served her here, too. 

We got to see her do some real acting, simple and uncomplex as it was, while the others were all doing surface caricatures (all that’s demanded by the script).  It’s just that Peg doesn’t reach anywhere near the level of Martha, just as Story can’t come close to Virginia Woolf so that Turner’s talents are pretty much wasted.  She could have phoned this in—though it’s good for us she didn’t. 

Of the rest of the cast, Scott Parkinson was both the most fun to watch and, it would seem, had the most fun working.  He played Zygote in the sci-fi plot, the artificial human the “frosty scientist” created in her lab.  (For those who have forgotten their basic biology, a zygote is a fertilized egg.  Zygote, the character, turns out to have been created from Dr. Constance Hudson’s own egg in an experiment that went a little awry.)  Parkinson’s character is a cross among Peter Lorre, Gollum (Lord of the Rings), and Marty Feldman’s Igor in Young Frankenstein and he was both creepy and a little sweet.  But the character is so outlandish that Parkinson got to create the one truly unpredictable aspect of Busch’s script, which is so deliberately derivative that almost every surprise isn’t one.  In fact, if you think of Busch as a sort of Mel Brooks manqué, Zygote is the closest he comes to Brooks’s most inspired looniness, and Parkinson, like Turner with her character, hit it right on the nose.

The rest of the cast, because of their parts as I’ve suggested, never got beyond caricature and cartoon.  They were all surface roles because that’s all the script required.  Jonathan Walker’s Drew, Peg’s son, came closest to a real stage character, but his Steve Bartlett, Queenie’s gunsel son, was no more than a celluloid reflection of a Bogie or Cagney role. 

Sarah Rafferty’s Verna, Steve’s platinum-haired bride, was equally one-dimensional, as if the actress were doing Leslie Ann Warren’s Norma from Victor/Victoria (the film) without the camp. (Ironically, Rafferty’s fairy tale role, Princess Vasalisa, however briefly she showed up, was fuller and more warm-blooded.) 

Jennifer Van Dyck, as Dr. Hudson, like her castmates, did what was needed, creating a clichéd cold-blooded scientist.  I can’t fault director Carl Andress for any of this, either, because it looked to me as if this was what Busch had written.  (Since the playwright was always there, I have to assume that if Andress, who had also directed the world première at La Jolla, had gone off the mark somewhere, Busch would have had a word with him, no?)  All Andress had to do here was keep the actors from bumping into one another or knocking the set over!

In the end, I guess it’s obvious, none of this added up to much.  Busch, from what I know of him (I’ve seen a few of his plays, but I’m not a follower, as I said), isn’t a playwright of ideas.  He’s all about cleverness—Look what I did!  Isn’t this funny?—and, in the past, anyway, outrageousness.  He’s not terribly outrageous anymore, and cleverness, even if he were better at it than he was here, isn’t enough to sustain a play.  Carol Burnett did that kind of thing, but in three-minute sketches.  (And she did it on free TV, so we could change the channel if we wished, and back in the ’60s, when it might have been, if not new, then uncommon.)