New Plays in Manhattan

Requiem for a Nun (by William Faulkner) is a journey through the dark night of the soul with a hint of dawn beyond. Its characters do not have the stature for tragedy, yet it is dense with guilt, pity and terror, and it frequently grips the audience in its palm like sinners in the hands of an angry God.

"Yes, Lawd. Guilty, Lawd. Thank you, Lawd," says Nancy Mannigoe, lifting her eyes serenely above the Mississippi bar of justice at which she stands condemned for throttling a six-month-old infant to death in its crib. Nancy is a Negro ex-prostitute, but her crime is a mere postscript to the horror-gorged life of her mistress, the dead child's mother, who is enslaved to the devil in the flesh. Mrs. Gowan Stevens was formerly Temple Drake, society-girl heroine of Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, to which Requiem for a Nun is a sequel. While the law has dealt with Nancy, it is the Furies of the past that hound Temple Drake.

Goaded by her uncle-in-law (implacably played by Zachary Scott), Temple tells all in a flashback confessional. It is a litany of lust and degradation. Eight years before, Temple had been kidnaped by a spiderish hoodlum named Popeye, kept six weeks in a Memphis brothel, and ''loved it." ("Nun" is a 19th century word for whore.) A year later Temple married the slack-spined Virginia gentleman, Gowan Stevens, who had been too drunk at the time of the kidnaping to protect her. It is only when Temple proposes to relive the bad old days with an ex-lover's younger brother that Nancy pleads with her to break the cycle of evil for the sake of her two children, and with the reasoning of utter despair kills the younger child to save a home for the elder.

At play's end Temple Drake begs Nancy's forgiveness. "Believe," says Nancy. "Only God can forgive sin, only God can make sense out of human suffering, just believe." Humbly, Temple Drake prepares "to save my soul, if I have a soul. If there is a God, and if he wants it."

In the role of Temple Drake, expressly written for her by Faulkner, Ruth Ford is altogether memorable. She flicks out her lines with an invisible riding crop, aristocratic in disdain, febrile in sexuality, empty-eyed at the soul's abyss. Scott McKay plays husband Gowan with just the right blend of weak will and good intention. And Bertice Reading's Nancy is a mixture of smoldering dignity and rock-like faith.

True in feeling, Requiem is sometimes hollow in logic. Temple's behavior is baffling except in terms of innate depravity. Nancy's sinner-into-saint switch is an abuse of poetic license. But to a theater often governed by the spirit of commerce, Faulkner has brought a play whose commerce is solely with the human spirit in its torment, in its aspirations, and in its vagrant moments of nobility.

Rashomon (by Fay and Michael Kanin) is essentially a stage remake of the eight-year-old Japanese film classic, and some of the charm and power of the film has spilled away in transit. Culled originally from two short stories by Japan's late mordant satirist, Akutagawa, Rashomon poses a philosophic question that means all things to all men: What is truth?

The time is 1,000 years ago. Rain drums like a dirge on the crumbling ruins of the great temple gate called Rashomon in Kyoto. Huddling in its shadows are three birds of strange omen--a Buddhist priest, a simple woodcutter (Akim Tamiroff) and a cynical wigmaker (Oscar Homolka)--who croak and cluck chorus-fashion about a hideous crime and the baffling trial testimony that followed.

In fluidly mounted flashbacks, four separate versions of the event are re-enacted. Up to a point the facts jibe. A bandit (Rod Steiger) has stalked a passing samurai (Noel Willman) and his wife (Claire Bloom) through a bamboo glade, decoyed the husband with promises of buried loot, trussed him up, and raped his wife before his eyes. The samurai is later found dead. According to the bandit, the wife baited him into killing her husband to gain her. The wife swears she killed him to spare him dishonor. Through a medium, the dead samurai claims that he heartbrokenly committed suicide. All three versions are exposed as self-interested lies when the eyewitnessing woodcutter gives a "true" account.

Under Peter Glenville's firm direction, this misanthropic drama thrums with barbaric violence, yet unfolds with the stylized gravity of ballet. Rashomon is rich in theater craft--Jo Mielziner's doom-dappled lighting, Laurence Rosenthal's eerily instrumented score, Oliver Messel's turntable forest of disenchantment. Apart from a U.N.-like babel of accents, the brilliant cast often achieves a triumph of mime over matter. Radiant, in white kimono, as netted moonlight, Claire Bloom is part lotus flower, part flower of evil. Noel Willman's samurai is a bred-in-the-bone aristocrat, and Rod Steiger's bandit a bite-to-the-bone outlaw.

But the moment of truth for these characters sadly shatters the mythic mood of the play. When the bandit is revealed as a braggart, the samurai as a snuffling coward and his wife as a trollop, the Kanins' script, unlike the film, fumbles away the Swiftian savagery of Akutagawa for something close to farce. What Akutagawa intended as the subtle shadow play of appearance and reality becomes, in the wigmaker's summing up, little more than an optical illusion: "Truth is a firefly. Now you see it; now you don't."

Tall Story (by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse) hinges on that old story of campus comedy, the Big Game in Jeopardy. According to its boosters, Custer College has "higher scholastic standards, a better basketball team, and a lower rate of pregnancy" than any little coed college in the Midwest. The haloed hoopster of the basketball team, a stilt-high science major named Ray Blent (played with engaging cyclonic dis-coordination by Robert Elston), is in love with the pert, bouncy girl cheerleader (Nina Wilcox). When $1,500 in fix money is anonymously planted in his overcoat, visions of marrying his sugarplum dance momentarily through Blent's troubled head. Between the girl, the game, and his duty, poor Blent is soon hooping around like a praying mantis about to be devoured by his conscience.

Thinking to sidestep the mess, Blent deliberately flunks two exams and makes himself ineligible for the big game. But this brings the entire college whooping around the two professors who do the flunking. As the two men on the ethical seesaw, Marc Connelly and Hans Conried make their subplot the play's amusing high spot. Pulitzer Prizewinner (The Green Pastures) Connelly, returning to his first acting role in a dozen years, is a portly wisecracker-barrel philosopher who knows that to stretch a point is sometimes to expand a viewpoint. Actor Conried, as a prim and absolute rationalist in home and classroom, achieves a kind of lemony grandeur. Here is a man who can purse up not only his lips but his entire face to ask: "Would Thomas Aquinas, under pressure, have changed a C-- to a B + ?" Inevitably, this ethical icicle is melted down in time to let Ray Blent save the day for Custer.

Tall Story is the kind of comedy that counts heavily on making its characters so lovable that they will be forgiven their bad gags. In context, some of the lines are fresh and funny. But too often the humor comes from the old joke factory ("Behave yourself, and have a good time --if that's possible"). Old theater Pros Lindsay and Crouse have sprinkled Tall Story liberally with corn, but half of it never pops.

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