TALLER THAN A DWARF

Zero starsT

he Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th Street, 239-6200.

A trip to the Longacre Theatre for the new Elaine May comedy “Taller Than a Dwarf” is like a tour in a humorless time machine.

You may think you’re there for a modern production but, in fact, it’s 1955. The few jokes about Reagan and liberalism could just as easily target Eisenhower.

It’s an uninteresting, shrill story, centered on Howard Miller (Matthew Broderick), an office whiz whom we glimpse as he gets up and dresses for work.

The key event here turns out to be a shower handle coming off. Miller pleads with his wife not to call the super but to hire a plumber instead. She must get dressed, too, for she’s also got a job (she’s a typist, I think).

A black kid from a neighboring apartment arrives. The kid, positioned by his mother to take advantage of white liberal guilt, gets walked to school every day by Miller.

But instead of taking him, Miller begins to brood, saying, “I’m a failure … since when is liberal a bad word?”

When Miller finally does go outside – Tony Walton’s set adds an unconvincing porch to the Queens building – he flings his lunch away in disgust.

A Irish cop, on unlikely foot patrol, sees his gesture and demands a bribe in exchange for not writing him up.

An angry Miller then turns to the audience and tells them, “You probably think I could have handled today better,” after which he goes home and back to bed, where he plays board games.

His parents arrive. His mother (Joyce Van Patten) serenades him with “Some of These Days,” while he sings in retort, “I Am Woman.” The shtick is mildly funny, but it’s not the first time a guy has gotten laughs with this song.

His wife comes home and they have a fight. Then there’s the crucial confrontation. The super shows up, angry and demanding an apology for an earlier insult.

Miller won’t apologize, insults him further and faints.

The rest of Miller’s family and his boss all turn up and approve of his standing up to the “dirty Nazi” of a super. Miller is a hero to all.

It is jaw-droppingly unfunny and pointless. Broderick is getting a bit old to play the eternal victim – there is not a single challenging moment for him.

Parker Posey, wacky queen of indie cinema, makes a peculiar choice for a depressed Queens wife. She never makes this poor creature vivid or authentic. (Not that she’s been given a chance by the script.)

As Miller’s parents, Van Patten is insufferable as a caricature of a Jewish mother, and Jerry Adler is a comically quiet Jewish dad.

Posey’s mother is played by Marcia Jean Kurtz, who is at least authentic, but her routine quickly grows tiresome. The boss is Sam Groom, whose character is given a tritely contemporary spin.

The super (Michael McShane) and the cop (Greg Stuhr) are demeaning and insulting ethnic impersonations – and the moral low points of May’s writing.

Walton’s set – fragments of rooms with slanting walls – seems to comment on the play, but what does it say? Alan Arkin’s direction seeks to conceal the emptiness, the datedness of the material.

As recently as 1994, when she did “Power Plays,” May offered brilliant and unsettling material, set mainly in the Manhattan world of the paranoid and graced with her mad logic.

This “Taller Than a Dwarf” seems like a sitcom version of Queens, but a sitcom that’s singularly unfunny, smug and superior.

Give us a real writer of Queens lunacy like John Guare.