One joy of Larry Gelbart's Sly Fox is the fun that the playwright has in mocking the aging and death of privileged males. No one in the play of advanced years is shown any respect whatsoever, and how delightful that unwaveringly cynical attitude is. There's no fool like an old fool, Gelbart is saying -- as did Ben Jonson before him in Volpone, the Elizabethan opus from which the contemporary playwright generously helped himself for the plot of Sly Fox.

The wisest fool here is Foxwell J. Sly (Richard Dreyfuss), who's bilking his avaricious neighbors of their worldly goods -- including one wife -- with the promise of making each of them sole heir to his accumulating fortune. Greedy Abner Truc[...]