Compassionate Young Man

In the first original play of its five years of faithful adaptations, the Peabody-Award-winning Hallmark Hall of Fame rose to a level rare in the theater and rarer yet on TV. The drama: Little Moon of Alban, a lyric consecration of love and faith by young (30) Playwright-Actor James Costigan.

Little Moon's young Irish heroine, embroiled in the "troubles" of 1916-21, felt her faith in God shaken when the English occupiers killed her father, brother and betrothed. She sought refuge as a Roman Catholic Sister of Charity, was soon assigned to nurse the Englishmen who had destroyed her world. In a Dublin hospital she found another man whom she could have loved: a vehemently cynical British soldier, so badly wounded that death seemed sure to overtake him in his bitter atheism--and--her hope of finding her salvation by effecting his.

Bundle of Paradoxes. In less capable hands than Playwright Costigan's, Little Moon might have been eclipsed by the maudlin religiosity that afflicts showmen on rare visits to church. Costigan told his mystic-tinged love story with subtlety, taste and poetic fervor. His unloving lovers were Julie (Joan of Arc) Harris, no stranger to theatrical heights, and Christopher Plummer, the Toronto-born actor who did as well for Costigan as he usually does in Shakespeare. His director was Hall of Fame's skilled George Schaefer. But the playwright had mostly himself to thank for the story, in which the lovers were parted to take their divergent paths. It was as if a theologian-poet had rewritten A Farewell to Arms, replacing its bodies with souls.

James Costigan, son of a chandelier maker, is both poet and theologian (though he does not profess to be either), as well as a bundle of paradoxes. Though he cultivates a faint brogue derived from his County Kerry ancestry, he never saw Ireland until 1954. He can talk religion with the most devout, but he has not practiced Roman Catholicism since his high school days ended his formal education. Though Hollywood seems a most unlikely place to have produced the author of Little Moon, he was raised there, played some bit parts as a child, shook off the "meaningless" glamour at 19 to go to Manhattan, "the Mecca of the artist."

"Tragic Beauty." A slight, unprepossessing man with a boyish face and frizzly red hair, Costigan is an actor of considerable force. He has played on such shows as Studio One and Omnibus. His "dismal" years as a Broadway stage hopeful helped turn Costigan into a TV playwright. In 1953 he ground out four original TV plays and six adaptations, then took off for a year in France and Ireland. Three times since then he has "gone home" to the country of his ancestors to absorb "the tragic beauty of the land, dark and sweet and green."

Back in the U.S., he had a fling at Hollywood again (26 frustrating weeks under a writer's contract), but began to hit his stride on Hallmark with his adaptations of Cradle Song and The Lark. But Little Moon, exuberantly greeted by most U.S. TV critics last week, seemed to mark a big upturn in Costigan's career. In it he grappled compassionately with "those forces in life that make it difficult or impossible," qualified as the kind of writer once described by Pascal in a line that Costigan likes to quote: ''I most admire those writers who tell with tears in their eyes what men do to other men."

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