New Play in Manhattan

My Heart's in the Highlands (by William Saroyan; produced by the Group Theatre) is the first play of William Saroyan, literary jackanapes and self-styled genius. Originally slated for only five performances, My Heart's in the Highlands was warmly praised by several critics, now plans an indefinite run.

Most of the critics, whether they liked the play or not, ostentatiously confessed ignorance of what it meant. A long, amorphous one-acter, it tells of an unsuccessful poet and his little son who live, not always even from hand-to-mouth, in a California town. Upon them stumbles an aged Shakespearean ham actor (Art Smith), a runaway from the Old Folks' Home, whose playing on a trumpet delights his hosts andthe townsfolk. The old actor finally dies spouting King Lear, and the poet and his son are evicted from their little house, take bravely to the road.

The point made by My Heart's in the Highlands is the old anti-Philistine insistence: that worldly success means nothing, that artistic failure means nothing, that what alone matters is man's vaulting imagination, his perdurable dream, the spiritual geography of his heart. On this theme Saroyan has composed the freest of fantasias, introducing rumbling chords of social protest, screwy dissonances, gaudy trills, touching pianissimos, mushy rubatos.

Violently anti-intellectual in his first play, as in most of his stories, Saroyan relies not on ordered thought but on a kind of surrealist association of words and moods. If his play is sometimes picturesque and tender, it is far too often soft, like a slushy Chopin nocturne: seeking to evoke something, never mind what; to bring tears to the eyes, never mind why.

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