AN ADULT EVENING OF SHEL SILVERSTEIN
Atlantic Theater Company, 336 W. 20th St. Through Nov. 18. Call Telecharge, (212) 239-6200.
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WATCHING “An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein” is like being stuck on a TV channel that’s rerunning old “Saturday Night Live” shows.
And not very good ones – just the ones with lame, strained skits that attempt to wring humor out of our cultural life several decades ago.
“An Adult Evening” is a painfully unfunny group of 10 short comic plays mysteriously revived by the Atlantic Theater Company.
Silverstein was a children’s writer and lyricist who apparently fancied himself a biting satirist. He wasn’t.
The skits have the feel of the 1970s – in a dumb, sexist way. There’s the one about the middle-class wife who’s turning into a bag lady and hides tennis shoes, picture frames, grapes and oatmeal in her pocketbook.
Other skits involve a woman being auctioned off into sex slavery at a chic auction house and hookers who solicit in verse and make jokes about AIDS.
A piece that reeks of the 1960s has police torturing the inventor of the smiley-face drawing. It’s dated hippie humor, right down to the tired slogans “far out” and “right on.”
The one piece that is still mildly amusing involves a strange laundry called Watch and Dry, run by a menacing guardian scarily played by Alicia Goranson.
The whole enterprise has a distracting and inappropriate futuristic plastic set by Walt Spangler and is heavily and almost humorlessly directed by Karen Kohlhaas. Change the channel.