Scuba duba

by Bruce Jay Friedman

This play concerns the misadventures of an American in the South of France. His wife has just gone off with a black skin-diver, and he is trying to be very fair and non-racial about it, although with indifferent results. His next-door neighbor is a bikini-clad American girl, who drops in chiefly to tell him pointless stories. She is also willing to comfort him, but his main interest is dramatizing himself as interchangeably forgiving and vengeful. The other visitors include a thief and a policeman who, being French, patriotically takes the French thief's side against him. The fatuous psychiatrist shows up, as does an impossible American who thinks he understands other races. The wife and her two black friends arrive, one the skin-diver who puts on a bogusly genial kind of minstrel act, the other a romantic type who makes love poetically. The play is about the relationships and interactions of these characters.