The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 55

CALENDAR Eos Angeles STuncs Television Listings Tuesday, February 21, 1984 Part VI MARSHA TRAECl'R ON THE RADIO BOB RAY: TUNED IN TO GENTLE COMEDY AGAIN Bob Ray routines focus on human frailty, to be sure, but they are neither snide nor cute. Buffoonery, fatuousness, hypocrisy and gullibility are all there, but in an absurd not a cruel display. Nevertheless, when they placed a small ad in the Village Voice for studio audiences to sit in on the taping of their programs last year, hundreds had to be turned away, Elliott said. "We get rediscovered every generation," he said. But not so much on the West Coast.

Program producer Larry Jo-sephson, who grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in New York, is not certain why the show which began airing last year on several East Coast stations has lagged in California. His latest subscriber list includes only seven California stations to serve a state with 22 million potential listeners, while 11 Minnesota stations and six from sparsely populated South Dakota have signed up. Please see ON THE RADIO. Page 9 ti" q. radio program since they left WOR in New York in 1976.

The last time they had a segment on a nationally broadcast program was a quarter century ago on NBC's "Monitor." "We were very well received at Stanford out there in California not too long ago," Elliott said in a telephone interview from New York, trying to search out the reason for the pair's perennial, if limited, popularity. "Maybe we're highbrow." That, in part, is why their first regular radio program in eight years is being released over 160 National Public Radio stations this month, he said (including KCRW-FM (89.9) locally). Fourteen weeks of the half-hour comedy show begin at 3 p.m. today. "There isn't any place for us on commercial radio today," Elliott said.

"They're all formatted. Set to music. There's only one, maybe two stations here in New York where we would fit in. Our fans are the same ones who listen to NPR." Bob Ray do make infrequent appearances on the "Tonight" and "Late Night With David Letter-man" shows, but face it: As a regular offering, Bob Ray simply haven't got the material to make it big in today's raw stand-up comedy, mass-media market. No clever references to cocaine, perversity, racism, venereal disease; none of the topicality that has put today's comic trend-setters at the top of the heap.

frpmVMw 'I Acting-out in "Beyond Therapy," from the left: Robert Picardo, Harry Shearer and Linda Purl. STAGE REVIEW DURANG AGAIN ONE STEP BEYOND i Is nothing sacred to Christopher Durang? First, he makes fun of Catholic education. Mary Ignatius Explains It All for Now he sends up mental health. "Beyond Therapy" is the new Durang comedy at the L.A. Public Theatre.

It suggests that anyone who goes to see a psychotherapist is crazy or will be, after a few sessions. It is a love story about two comic innocents "in treatment." Prudence (Linda Purl) and Bruce (Robert Picardo) meet at a restaurant through one of those blind lonely hearts ads. At first, Prudence, a traditionalist, doesn't know what to make of Bruce. She believes that men shouldn't cry "unless something heavy falls on them." Bruce seems to cry at everything. He also believes in being totally open.

For instance, he volunteers that he has a male lover at homei Bob (Harry Shearer). Prudence, By DENNIS McDOUGAL, Times Staff Writer In these leering, scatological times when Joan Rivers, Eddie Murphy and Rick Dees have insulted their way to dominance of the comedy airwaves. Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding who return to L.A. radio today are the gentle dinosaurs of comedy. As Bob Ray, a comedy team that dates back 38 years, they are regularly in demand for their radio commercials.

In recent years, they've made movie appearances Turkey," "Author! done a Broadway show, co-authored two books, hit the college circuit and are currently planning a major concert in May at Carnegie Hall. But they haven't had a regular "We get rediscovered every generation," says Bob Elliott. ROBINSON GUTS IT OUT IN 'BEAST' By LAWRENCE CHRISTON Cr I hey called me up for this. I knew I was gonna get the A part. When I first read the script, I got real scared.

Real scared." Andrew Robinson was talking with passion, with difficulty, with anguish and precision, about the challenge of bringing out the horror story of "In the Belly of the Beast" without sparing any of us its devastating implications. "Beast" is the book-length collection of letters by Jack Henry Abbott, adapted for the stage by Adrian Hall and further streamlined and directed by Robert Woodruff at the Taper, Too. Abbott, a 40-year-old lifelong convict and murderer, was for a brief period the darling of New York literary chic before it was stung by its own naivete when, free for one of the few times in his life, Abbott stabbed a man to death outside a New York restaurant. "We like to romanticize violence and the outlaw," Robinson said. "But this is no romance." The beast is the American penal system.

The story is about how an individual, Please see ROBINSON, Page 4 MULL PLIES HIS QUIET HUMOR ON TV By JAY SHARBUTT, Times Staff Writer Four years after getting his master's degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, Martin Mull and other unknown painters got to wondering how to get known. This led to an unauthorized art show, "Flush With the Walls," at your basic proper Boston museum. Mull's contribution was "Chief Flying Breakfast." It showed an Indian headdress, fried eggs and toast floating in various locales. This and other works, including one called "The World's Longest Nose," drew quite a crowd, maybe 350 strong, he said. In "due course, the museum's management joined the crowd.

Management didn't summon the fuzz, which was a surprise. Management smiled, another surprise. Management, he recalls, said, 'You young fellows and gals, you creative folks, gosh, we love Management suggested another art show, this one in the ladies' room, the first having been held in the men's room. "Next day, we came back to talk to them about it," he said. "We found that everything Ut A A ANIMATOR LEADS WITH A By DAN SULLIVAN, Times Theater Critic whom Purl plays in beautifully dead earnest, suspects that this could affect their relationship.

However, Bruce does treat her with more consideration than her sullen psychoanalyst, Stuart (David Clennon), with whom she is having a not-too-fulfilling affair. (Stuart wears boots to the office that should tell you about him. Bruce has a therapist of a different sort Charlotte (Carol Morley). She is of the California huggy-feely school. No, she and Bruce are not having a relationship.

She's more like Mom. And her advice to Bruce, when she remembers his name, is go for it! There are no shouldsl Charlotte thinks Bruce's exploration of his sexual options is wonderful. But Bruce's friend. Bob, who "has put a lot into this relationship," is truly offended by Bruce's waffling. And so is Bob's mother, when VIDEO FILE Above, Ace is attacked by Space Pups in scene from "Space Ace" laser disc arcade game.

At right, "Space Ace" creator Don Bluth. Boulevard office. "Laser games have to do with a plot or a goal, (and) their focal point has to be the relationships of the characters." This is Bluth's second video game. His first, "Dragon's Lair," last year rewrote the program on the teen-age video preoccupation and provided the one bright spot in an otherwise dismal season for the game business. The hero of that game, Dirk the Daring, saved the girl and Silicon Valley.

Despite having helped to develop the most revolutionary video games since Pong, Bluth is not himself a she gets Prudence on the telephone. (Shearer somehow makes you see both son and mother.) Will there be trouble? Only enough to bring us to a mad-hatter dinner party at the restaurant. Everyone gets sorted out, including the waiter, who turns out to be one of Charlotte's favorite patients she thinks (Charles Van Eman). This is screwball comedy for the mixed -up '80s, and not as cynical and amoral as it may sound. Durang, as we get to know him, turns out to be a conservative, not at all sure that the new openness is that much of an advance over the old repressions, there being something fundamentally out of whack with the human race to begin with.

For example, the comic observer in Durang delights in Stuart-the-shrink's ability to carry on an affair with a patient behind his own back, so to speak even to blame her for not sufficiently appreciating his Please see Page 6 'SPACE ACE' video game master. He says he doesn't have the quick eye-hand coordination necessary for the games. "Whenever I want to feel demoralized, I go play video games," Bluth said. Bluth, maker of the 1982 animated feature "The Secret of NIMH," does know a good story when he comes up with one, and that's what he is trying to tell with his games. He is first a film maker attempting to transform the passive movie-watching experience into an active, participatory event.

"We're looking at the forerunner of the interactive movie," Bluth said. From that perspective, "Dragon's Lair" and, now, "Space Ace," may be the modern version of the ancient magic lantern or zoetrope Please see VIDEO FILE, Page 9 1 I v-v Ray Goulding of Bob Ray "Write if you get work." IAN DRYDEN Lot AngtlM Tim romanticism in "Belly of the her father called "Papa Cleared His Throat," currently is employed as an actor, as the star of a CBS sitcom called "Domestic Life." (Network programming being what it is, the sitcom is on vacation this month after just four Wednesday-night airings, but will return to the airwaves in March, according to CBS.) In "Life," Mull essays an essayist on a TV news show. Said show resembles KABC-TV's "Eyewitness News" in that when it starts, everyone briskly strides to the anchor desk with an air of urgency, as if they've just arrived from the front and not the makeup room. In his portion of the newscast. Mull comments on life's little problems.

The rest of the time, he copes with life's little problems at home with his family one wife and two kids. But he emphasizes that "Life" isn't a family sitcom. Rather, it's a gentle spoof of family sitcom cliches, joshing the genre one might call "Leave It to Beaver City." Alas, he said, some people, such as TV critics, don't seem to have noticed this. Their reviews have tended to dismiss "Life" as a garden-variety family sitcom. They wonder how Mull, once loose in such celebrated spoof -TV tableaux as "Mary Hartman, Mary Hart-man," "Fernwood 2Night" and "America 2Night," could have fallen so sideways.

Other bad news. Although "Life," co-produced by Steve Martin, is Please see MARTIN MULL. Page 10 By DAVID CROOK, Times Staff Writer li Kimberley, the buxom female lead in "Space Ace," were forced to rely on her creator to save her from the clutches of the evil Borf, then she'd really be in trouble. Producer Don Bluth admits right off that he is not very good at blasting evil space ships or guiding star cruisers through a hostile cosmos. And that's certainly not what Kimberley needs to hear.

No worry, though. She can count on her boyfriend, Ace, to slay the Grumlets, Squidants and Babaloons that stand between him and his true love. Not even Borfs dreaded In-fanto Ray can stop Ace from saving the damsel in distress. That may sound like a very bad midnight TV movie, as old, tired and cliched as they come. But "Space Ace" is not your every-day low-budget movie.

It is a very high -budget, sophisticated, animated video game. As a result of the recent marriage of the computer to the laser videodisc, "Space Ace" players may guide the hero through the game as if they are directors in command of a multimillion-dollar film crew. Players not only fire ray guns at an endless stream of enemies, they make Ace's decisions for him, choosing from among a handful of possible outcomes for each scene of the game. "Laser technology is a whole new ballgame," said Bluth in an interview last week in his Ventura Andrew Robinson, knifing out FITZGERALD WHITNEY Lot Angela Time Actor-comedian Martin Mull of CBS sitcom "Domestic Life." we'd done they'd taken down, as garbage, and burned." Some young artists were outraged. There was talk of protests, rallies, maybe a muffled explosion even.

Mull wasn't part of it, though. His heart does not belong to Dada. He blew town, was active in the movement against "the great folk-music scare of the '60s" and later formed the Midget Band (full of regulation-size people). Then he pressed on to fame and hyphenation in Hollywood as an actor-painter-guitarist-singer-composer -comedian. Mull, who among other things has a mustache, is 40 and claims that his mother once wrote a biography of INSIDE CALENDAR JAZZ: Stan Getz's two-man band at Hop Singh's reviewed by Leonard Feather.

Page 6. MUSIC: The Vienna Philharmonic's second concert reviewed by Albert Goldberg. Page 2. STAGE: "Finding Donis Anne" reviewed by Lawrence Christon. Page 6.

TV: Tonight on TV and on cable. Page 7. Lauren Hutton tells Roderick Mann she should have studied acting earlier. Page 5..