BRUNO OF HOLLYWOOD

Accompanying puffs from Amy Tan and Pat Conroy notwithstanding, this performance from actor/author Mantee (In Search of the Perfect Ravioli, 1991) comes across as stupefyingly shallow stuff. Bruno's best pages are the hero's mock dialogues with Burt Lancaster, much like Woody Allen's with Bogart in Play It Again, Sam. The rest, chockablock with brand names and banal movie and entertainment references, bears an almost Joycean opacity that renders up but faint plot and hangs its humors on almost no palpable spine or skeleton. A long flashback set in a bar, the story lazes upward like bubbles in a brandy and soda as Bruno Sangenito (stage name Johnny Bruno) sits beside a date, Margie Cosgrove, whom he last saw as a teenager back in 1953, and reveals to us his life story since then as a starstruck Hollywood wannabe. At one point he recalls his first date with Margie, as her mother, Beryl, flops onto the couch beside him while he waits for Margie: ``[Beryl] threw me helter-skelter into a deeper sea, as she lifted a Lucky—picture a stem on an olive in a silver tray—from the case on the coffee table between us, and bound me, gagged me, hung me by the neck with eyes that held secrets to secrets. She tamped her cigarette twice and dead center on a polished fingernail that had touched privacy. Put it to her mouth...crossed those long delicate legs one over the other, and shared with me for a split second her most personal freckles. Those that lie in wait inside darkness, where nylons fear to tread and garter belt dares to begin. Then languished her arm out and across a sculptured knee, Lucky perched a la mode.'' Judge for yourself.