Catchall-22

Viet Nam has become the profane cow of U.S. theater. Onstage it seems to inspire polemic frenzy, puerile logic and sob-opera bathos. That was true of the off-Broadway musical Viet Rock, and it is even truer of We Bombed In New Haven, a first play by Joseph Heller, whose Catch-22 was a novel of comic pitchblende. His lackluster drama is a kind of catchall-22, a wastebasket version of antiwar cliches too feeble for use in the novel. While the production is securely mounted by the Yale School of Drama Repertory Theater, student actors are scarcely in evidence except as bit players. The professional credentials of the leading performers suggest that Yale is becoming a theatrical busman's holiday from off-Broadway.

Leaning precariously on Pirandello and Brecht for his dramatic hocus and pocus, Heller has written a spoof of the old-fashioned war play or film. Before a precarious bombing mission, an Air Force captain (Stacy Keach) goads his squadron with poetic tunes of glory extrapolated from Kipling and Shakespeare. A corporal disappears in the first sortie and a sergeant is shot to death for refusing to go on a second. Heller indulges in hortatory asides to the audience: "Another young boy killed in a war and all of you just sit there." By the time the captain has to order his own son on a mission, it would take a rug rather than a handkerchief to sop up the teary sentimentality.

In a way, Heller belongs to a sad but honorable tradition. Good novelists from Henry James to Hemingway have often been poor playwrights. In recent years, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and James Baldwin have also bombed theatrically, though not in New Haven.

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