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`Man Who Came to Dinner' is a winner OSF production does justice to classic '39 play By Bill Varble of the Mail Tribune The critic Alexander Woollcott is said to have remarked to playwright George S. Kaufman, "I'm the only man you know who can strut sitting down." The story goes that the Great Man was badgering Kaufman for the lead role in the Chicago production of "The Man Who Came to Dinner." It was no secret that Kaufman and his writing partner, Moss Hart, had based the play's central character, Sheridan Whiteside, on Woollcott, who bestrode the worlds of letters, arts and entertainment like a colossus. (It was to no avail; the Chicago part went to Clifton Webb, and the Broadway role had gone to Monty Woolley, then teaching drama at Yale). To the short list of sit-down strutters, add Ken Albers. In the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's new production of Kaufman and Moss Hart's 1939 classic, Albers, who spends most of the play in a vintage wheelchair, is the irascible, outrageous Sheridan Whiteside. As the play opens, Whiteside, the man who put the center in self-centered, has taken over the nice, conservative, upper-middle-class home of the Stanleys in Mesalia, Ohio. It seems he injured a hip in a fall at their doorstep while on a tour of the hinterlands and must be immobilized. We understand that in addition to being the nation's most-feared critic, he is a radio personality, lecturer, raconteur and confidant of the rich and famous. He can make or break a play, a book or a lesser mortal with his thunderbolt wit. And since Christmas is his personal property, he's not about to let it be ruined by the fact that he's confined to the Stanleys' home in the boondocks, or as he puts it, "trapped like a rat in this hell hole!" He commandeers the telephone, the parlor and the library, takes over the Stanleys' cook and butler and meddles in the lives of the Stanleys' two children. In his booming voice, he delivers orders that sound like a cross between immutable geometry theorems and wisecracks from God. He's deluged with phone calls from the luminaries of the day (author H.G. Wells, a young Walt Disney, a Harpo Marx-ist comic/actor named Banjo) and receives outlandish gifts (a cockroach farm from the wacky Professor Metz with earphones to monitor their mating behavior, a crate of live penguins from famed explorer Adm. Richard Byrd). Banishing the Stanleys to their bedroom, he mentions as an afterthought that he's suing them for $150,000 -- that's in 1939 dollars. Whiteside suffers constantly from the inadequacies of the human race, coping only with the help of his tough/tender secretary, Maggie Cutler (Robynn Rodriguez). So when she falls in love with local newspaperman/playwright wannabe Bert Jefferson (Michael Elich), Whiteside must concoct a scheme to keep her. He does this by convincing aging femme fatale Lorraine Sheldon (Judith-Marie Bergan) that the part of the ingenue in Jefferson's sure-to-be-a-hit new play is made to order for her. She's a renowned gold-digger with the instincts of an alley cat. And since Whiteside, like Woollcott in real life, has the power to make or break a play at a whim, this ensures a major move on the personable Jefferson by the predatory Sheldon. But nobody's mamas raised dummies here, and chess-like scheming and counter-scheming ensue, with hilarious results. Director Warner Shook said in notes he wrote for the Festival that the play is put together like a Swiss watch, and that is indeed the case. Here are 24 actors, no less, their comings and goings revolving around the infuriating figure of Whiteside like moons around a great, fat star. A couple of minor glitches notwithstanding, the actors get into a comic sweet spot where the difference between timing that's perfect and almost perfect is like the difference between lightning and lightning bug, and it's lightning almost every time. The play is rare among plotty comedies for the richness of its characters. Foremost, of course, is Whiteside. Beneath his gruff, infuriating exterior is an gruff, infuriating interior. But we also sense something that makes the world willing to put up with him. When he's not delivering zingers, Albers is a master of the pregnant pause that makes the ensuing bon mot all the more delicious. Bergan's Lorraine Sheldon is smart, sexy and formidable. Richard Elmore, as the urbane Beverly Carlton, is wickedly, hilariously over the top. Eileen DeSandre suffers long and hard as the quirky Nurse Preen, a favorite Whiteside foil. How funny is "The Man Who Came to Dinner?" The many teen-agers who saw it this day cheered and whooped and laughed as they were sucked into the 1939 world of these characters. Did they recognize that Sherry Whiteside is Woollcott? Banjo a young Harpo Marx? Lorraine the actress Gertrude Lawrence and Beverly the great Noel Coward? It's a testimony to the multi-leveled wit of Hart and Kaufman, and the quality of this production, that that doesn't matter a whit. The only bad news is that the play has already sold the bulk of its seats for the season, and tickets may be hard to get. Bill Varble covers arts and entertainment for the Mail Tribune. Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA