New Play in Manhattan

Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (by Sean O'Casey) waited nine years to reach New York, and then turned up off Broadway. Written long after O'Casey's lusty, naturalistic prime, it is streaked with fantasy and symbolism. Its man-sized crowing cock is everything that Ireland, for O'Casey, is not--life-loving, joyous, free. Against his feathered friend O'Casey sets all his inveterate foes--ignorant old windbags, bullying priests, superstition-clogged rustics, tightfisted employers. Above all, a tyrannic Puritanism blasts the temptations of the flesh, makes war on warmblooded temptresses.

With its scarifyingly freakish weather, eerie sounds and collapsing houses, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy becomes at times a farcical free-for-all, as at other times it blares a propagandist freedom-for-no-one. Much of the writing, whether wrathful, lyrical or lowdown, has the true O'Casey tang. And despite symbols that are more like stencils and incidents too much like one another, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy has its amusing scenes and its fiery ones. Unhappily, in a quite un-Gaelic and ponderous production, there emerges nothing of the robustly comic playwright; the horseplay is elephantine, the darts are leaden cannonballs. What alone and all too stridently emerges is O'Casey's angry protest. Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, in any real sense, has still to be produced in New York.

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