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But it's Ian Hirsch who does the real acting. He was good too in American Buffalo and he's so well-cast as Harry -- with a growly Bronx-ish accent and apelike hairy arms -- that he's at serious risk of being typecast as some kind of lowlife. His best moment the night I saw him came during a monologue about Harry's background in metaphysics. Harry listed all the philosophers he'd heard of, and an audience member in the front row, possibly fooled by the beer into thinking Just Wild About Harry was an interactive play, started to yell encouragement -- "Schiller! Spinoza!" Jackie asked Harry how he knew these esoteric things, and Hirsch, straight-faced, improvised: "I used to room with the guy in the front row," he said. "He was a real psycho." Henry Miller would have been proud.
-- Michael Scott Moore
