A Clink of Truism

Plays for Bleeclcer Street (by Thornton Wilder). Art as wisdom is the special province of age. Whether the last quartets are Beethoven's or T. S. Eliot's, the artist as sage tries to transmute a quantity of experience into a quality of meaning, and answer ultimate questions. At the age of 64, a distinguished U.S. man of letters, Thornton Wilder, has embarked on such a summing-up in a cycle of 14 one-act jMays divided into two groups, "The Seven Ages of Man" and "The Seven Deadly Sins." The off-Broadway debut of three of the playlets, two from the Man series (Infancy, Childhood) and one from the Sins series about lust (Someone from Assisi) is not auspicious.

Infancy wheels two baby carriages into Manhattan's Central Park. Up pop two tottery man-sized heads. These premature grownups in baby bonnets promptly explain that their caterwauling tantrums are not simple diaper and meal calls, as adults believe, but stem from a voracious and frustrated thirst for learning. They want to walk, talk, build houses, and have babies of their own. Their keepers, a fat mother who gorges herself on candy-counter goodies and a nurse who gobbles up drugstore novels, are shown to be truly infantile. But after the age-group hourglass has been turned upside down, the sands of drama merely trickle through, and the effect is cute rather than acute.

Childhood explores the shadowy fantasy life of youngsters and the bad phone connection between parent and child that keeps each from ever quite understanding the other. It shimmers with the subtle and subdued radiance of Our Town, the unique Thornton Wilder signature that no one else in the U.S. theater can convincingly forge. Two girls and a boy, aged 13, 10 and 8, play what Mother calls one of their "morbid" games, "Funeral." In the game, Father and Mother have died in a bloody accident, and the children gather in church to praise them with faint damns. Mother was nice, "but she was always shopping." Father was a fine man, but "he never said anything very interesting."

Savoring the full careless rapture of having no parents ("Do we get any money for being orphans?" asks the boy hopefully), the children go for a make believe bus ride. The conductor looks suspiciously like Papa, and a back-seat passenger like Mama. Delicately, Wilder suggests each child's need to love the thing he kills, especially parents. The wayward bus ride has its own hazards--jaywalkers, Indians, floods--and it gives Wilder a chance for a stalwart reflection on the business of living: "Fight. Struggle. Survive."

Child actors are apt to lose the natural graces and harum-scarum spontaneity of real children, but Debbie Scott, Susan Towers and Philip Visco are unselfconsciously perfect, and except for a last-minute flurry of sentimentality, so is the play.

Someone from Assisi confronts St. Francis with a woman he had known carnally in his prevocational days. She is now as whirling mad as he is gently pious. The whole episode has the air of bogus revelation, as if it had been excerpted from a TV show called "Francis--This is Your Life."

In Plays for Bleecker Street, Thornton Wilder repeats, but does not enlarge, his basic credo that life is life, a tautology tinged with profundity. Except for Childhood, the playlets are insufficiently dramatized, and the prevailing sound of the evening is the clink of truism rather than the ring of truth.

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