New Plays off-Broadway

Roots (by Arnold Wesker) is the first play by this much-heralded "angry" young English playwright to reach New York. But if all too social-minded. Roots is in tone--except dismayingly at the end --far from angry; it might qualify, in fact, as the flattest-voiced play of the season. This is part of its meaning: it concerns the return of a young girl living in London to her farm-worker family --set, ignorant, mean-souled people given to drab gossip and barnyard jokes. The girl, having gained wider horizons through a self-educated Socialist boy friend, vainly hymns culture and social awareness to her family. Then, just when her lover is to arrive for a visit, a letter from him arrives instead, chucking her as not up to his world.

Wesker uses a slice-of-life technique to convey a slice of lifelessness. Small, dun-colored, repetitious detail is ladled out till the audience is saturated in it. There is a certain mild humor in the repetitions, whether of the family's deadness or the offstage boy friend's didactic, doctrinaire lust for life. The humor turns grim when he rejects the girl, herself now lost between two worlds, too low for a hawk and too high for a buzzard. An honest but limited method, Wesker's leads to truthful but limited effects, and to believable characters; and in a theater season of flaccid falsity, there is something to respect in the way it rings true. But there should be more to respond to, something with personal as well as sociological value; and the play's own self-created mood is shattered when at the end the girl bursts not into a blind, hurt personal rage but into an ideological harangue. It is as harmfully incongruousas if a small country hillock suddenly erupted with lava; and such lack of judgment suggests that much of Wesker's literalness derives from inherent lack of art.

Rendezvous in Senlis (translated from the French of Jean Anouilh by Edward Owen Marsh), though early and playful Anouilh, has all his earmarks and tooth marks, his jarring flavors, his jolting banter, his cactus-spined nonsense. It is also as often wordy as witty, and wayward as skillful. In a very jaunty first act. a young man--to impress a young lady--rents a house and hires himself two parents and an old family retainer. Then it turns out that he already has a wife, whose wealth keeps his real parents and his mistress and her husband in luxurious idleness. Soon these shoddy-chic cadgers, the pure, unworldly young lady and the three hired attendants are caught up with the young man in an Anouilhan dance of masks and mummery, of virginal love and veteran hate, pouncing as they pirouette, conspiring as they bid adieu.

Rendezvous provides another very Anouilhan clash of sentiment and cynicism, another dream of the pure in a world of the tarnished. As playwriting it never fulfills its bright first-act promise; along with what is striking and amusing, there ensues too much babble of talk and muddle of tone. It is here that the matter of production becomes crucial: a play so nonchalant and brittle needs more than the intelligent off-Broadway staging it has been given. It needs more gloss, more speed, more edged insouciance, needs the light shrug, the swift glance, the faint smile, the finished gesture, the unfinished comment that endow the semi-frivolous with airiness and enlarge the semi-serious into an attitude.

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