New Play in Manhattan

Stalag 17 (by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski; produced by Jose Ferrer) is an unexpectedly bright little knickknack, considering the nature of its subject and the lateness of the season. Set in a Nazi prison barracks full of U.S. airmen, toward the end of World War II, it mixes a good deal of earthy comedy with lively if commonplace melodrama. Somebody in the barracks is plainly blabbing the prisoners' small secrets to the Nazis. And when there is something really serious to blab about -- when a new prisoner confides that he set a Nazi train on fire -- the informer's identity becomes crucial.

As a thriller, Stalag 17 chugs along a straight formula route. But it goes at a decent clip, and in its way is quite uncompromising; it never taints its hokum with anything the least bit real. The humor, coming from prisoners rigidly confined to a few acres, is itself rigidly confined to a few topics, most of them supremely physical. But the men themselves, with their gripes and their razzing, form a diverting cross section from a rough-cut Polish-American G.I. to a Back Bay blueblood.

Playwrights Bevan & Trzcinski, who met during their years in a German prison camp, provide a few glimpses of Nazi brutality. But in general they display sharper memories for what goes over on the stage than what went on in their stalag. Producer Ferrer, in his boisterous staging, equally neglects mind and heart for spine and funnybone.

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