Theatre in Review: Olive and the Bitter Herbs (Primary Stages/59E59) Meet Olive Fisher. A New York actress of a certain age -- if you asked her for the exact figure, she'd probably hit you -- her one moment of fame came in the '80s, when she played an old sourpuss ---not unlike Clara Peller, the "where's-the-beef" lady -- in a series of sausage commercials. It was a neat bit of typecasting; a tougher old termagant never walked the earth. "I'm unlovable; I can gives you references," she notes, with more than a little satisfaction. Speaking of her long-running feeling of persecution by the rest of the tenants of her Kips Bay apartment house, she comments, "I'm like a Tutsi and the co-op board is the Hutu." Charles Busch, Olive's creator and a man who certainly knows his way around a wisecrack, has fun demonstrating Olive's ability to give as good as she gets. She rails against her noisy neighbors ("They entertain until nine o'clock at night!"). She derides the new décor in her building's lobby ("This is an apartment house, not a Tuscan villa."). When the doorbell rings, her default answer is, "Shut up!" And, turning so defensive you can practically see the armor plates sliding into place, she asks an interlocutor, in a dangerously quiet voice, "What makes you think I'm Jewish?"--before admitting, nonchalantly, that her maiden name is Blechman. Olive would prefer to be left alone --"Regrets provide fine entertainment when there's nothing on cable," she notes, describing her version of a good time -- but fate and Charles Busch are determined to fill her apartment with well-intentioned invaders. These include Wendy, a goodhearted theatrical company manager who likes to do for old ladies; Robert and Trey, the couple in the adjoining apartment, who torment Olive with their cocktail parties and aromatic cheese collection; and Sylvan, a sixtysomething widower strangely drawn to difficult women, who realizes he has hit the jackpot with Olive. As long as Olive and the Bitter Herbs maintains its cranky, gag-filled ways, it offers a pretty steady diet of hilarity, especially when everyone sits down for a Passover seder that simmers with barely suppressed conflict. (Olive, directing the proceedings with the finesse of a Prussian general, cuts one lengthy passage from the Haggadah, adding, "Tovah Feldshuh doesn't do it.") As Olive, Marcia Jean Kurtz, parading around in a series of flowery housedresses, her face frozen into a permanent grimace, fires one verbal salvo after another, leaving nothing but scorched earth in her wake. She is aided immeasurably by Julie Halston as Wendy, whose unlimited fund of goodwill is guaranteed to drive Olive around the bend; David Garrison as Robert, who, to Olive's frustration, simply cannot be insulted; and Dan Butler as Trey, who harbors some very Olive-like characteristics himself. "Once and for all, I do not have rage issues," he snaps in a manner that suggests he may have to eat those words. (Garrison and Butler are both better performers than their gays-next-door stereotypes would have you believe.) Applying emotional balm at every turn is Richard Masur as Sylvan, who even manages to get a romantic rise out of Olive, despite her assertion that "Nobody's flirted with me since Nixon resigned." Trouble sets in when it's time to get to the plot -- never Busch's forte, and a particularly sore point here. Steel yourself for this one: A magic mirror in Olive's living room is revealed to be inhabited by the ghost of a deceased male real estate agent who also did a mean Phyllis Diller impersonation. Instead of dismissing this news as the product of Olive's stroke-weakened mind, everyone becomes oddly obsessed with the object, for reasons that become clear during a climactic torrent of revelations that lays bare a series of hidden connections among them all. This scene offers more surprises than the combined climaxes of Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale; to be less plausible than either play is something of a feat, if not necessarily one to be proud about. At a certain point, Olive's default response to life -- "Shut up!" -- starts to sound like good sense. The second act has its moments, include a doozy of an exit for Wendy, whose good nature finally cracks under Olive's constant sniping, but the bitter truth is that Olive and the Bitter Herbs squanders its premise in a series of increasingly strained shockers. Busch can't really convince us that Olive is ready to ripen into the life-loving type, and his more-or-less happy ending couldn't feel more contrived. Fortunately, Mark Brokaw's direction unearths every available laugh, and his direction offers other grace notes, among them an amusing scene change in which the Passover dinner is laid out in a spirit of naked hostility. But even he can't keep Kurtz's thundering way with a zinger from becoming a little too shrill, and everybody else struggles with the eleventh-hour surprises, most of which undermine their characters. Nobody designs New York locations with more with wit than Anna Louizos, and her apartment setting -- the last rental in an East 30s co-op, defined by smudged walls, ratty furniture, an array of Chinese fans, and wallpaper that hasn't been seen since, well, the Nixon administration -- is a dumpy delight. Mary Louise Geiger's lighting burnishes it all with a welcoming glow, providing the right environment for comedy. Suzy Benzinger's costumes, from Olive's housedresses to outfits that sharply define the differences in age and status between Robert and Trey, are totally spot-on. John Gromada's sound design blends a variety of street sounds, a bit of a Law and Order-style television program (including a parody of that show's famed "ka-chunk"), and the tones of doorbells and telephones with his amusing incidental music. At least in the first act, Olive and the Bitter Herbs packs many crowd-pleasing elements, especially for older audiences who miss the days of old-fashioned Broadway comedies, but, in truth, Busch's play mostly serves to demonstrate that they don't make them like they used to. Poor Olive; wiith a vehicle like this, she should be happy?--David Barbour 
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