Down With the Superbrain

The Child Buyer. When G. B. Shaw wrote Man and Superman, he preached the intensive cultivation of man's brain as the crowning end of man. The Child Buyer, adapted by Paul Shyre from John Hersey's novel, sees the sedulously cultivated brain as man's perdition. But any resemblance between Shaw and Shyre-Hersey is only thematic. The Shaw comedy is still full of Mozartean eloquence, gusto and grace; the Shyre-Hersey play drones along with tongue-clattering one-note monotony.

The child buyer (Lester Rawlins) purchases highly intelligent "specimens" for United Lymphomoloid, a vast penumbra of a corporation with top-secret government contracts and a futuristic 50-year program for "leaving the earth." If the parents are willing to sell their child, the "specimen" goes through a memory-deleting process and submits to a chilling form of surgery that "ties off" the five senses. He is then on a par with his peers-computers.

The sole action of the play is a state senatorial inquiry into a case of child buying, in which a parade of witnesses relate their roles in the affair. This woe fully static device comes down to describing the play that isn't there. Along the way, Shyre and Hersey plunk paper bullets into pre-perforated targets-the jargon of educationists, the corrupting TV-loot mentality, the jingoistic powerelites of government, business and education. There is one brief moment of absurdly human pathos when the boy himself (Brian Chapin) agrees to go with the child buyer in the hope that "some day, I might achieve an IQ of over 1,000."

The Shyre-Hersey play is admirably animated by human decency. It falters because it cannot credit other humans with a like will and decency to resist the pervasive wiles of the inhumane.

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