ADDRESS UNKNOWN
At the Promenade Theatre, 2162 Broadway. Call Telecharge (212) 239-6200.
‘ADDRESS Unknown” is an absurd melodrama set in the early 1930s about Max, a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and his partner Martin, a German based in Munich increasingly in sympathy with the newly installed Nazis.
Director Frank Dunlop adapted this play himself from a 1938 novel by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, which was made into a near-forgotten 1944 movie with Paul Lukas.
It is an epistolary play, to coin a phrase – that is, Max reads his own letters to Martin stage right in his modern chrome office while Martin reads his to Max stage left in his old-fashioned leather library.
Jim Dale, normally an antic comedian, is here restrained and anguished as Max, while William Atherton is stiff, solemn and nasty as the uniform-and-boot-clad Martin.
The correspondence grows increasingly chilly as Martin becomes more enamored of the Nazis and Max becomes more disturbed.
Martin demands their business partnership be dissolved, while a puzzled Max asks, “Who is this Adolf Hitler?”
Things come to a head between Martin and Max when Griselle, Max’s sister and Martin’s former lover, is arrested for insulting the Nazis from the stage where she is appearing in a play.
Martin will not lift a finger to save Griselle from arrest, and Max decides on a clever epistolary revenge upon Martin.
Ultimately, the whole megillah is about as improbable and silly as “Casablanca.”
It smacks of Hollywood rather than history, and neither Taylor nor Dunlop bother to make their stupid tale plausible for a minute.
Why on earth did Dunlop want to resuscitate this?
Unlike “Casablanca,” it boasts neither wit nor sex to make the mix go down.