Triple Trouble

By T. E. K.

Every playwright might do well to inscribe a verse from the English Book of Common Prayer on his wall or his mind: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done." A few plays fail through unbelievable incompetence. Many more fail (aesthetically if not commercially) through a casual neglect of the basic elements of theater. Drama needs plot, character and conflict. Drama needs language of resonance, tempo and style--something more than a faithful reproduction of what people say at college commencements, dog tracks and Sunday brunches. Above all, drama needs a strong personal vision, not that of the camera's eye, but of the mind's eye. Three recent entries on and Off Broadway have attracted a measure of critical and popular support; yet they are more instructive for their flaws than their virtues.

NIGHT WATCH. In a mystery thriller, clues may be misinterpreted, but they ought not to be deliberately misleading. When the scattered links are put together, they should form a logical chain. Lucille Fletcher (Sorry, Wrong Number) fails to keep that compact with the audience. Most of Night Watch seems like a rehash of Gaslight, with a neurasthenic wife being driven totally batty by her calculating husband and his mistress (Elaine Kerr). An unprepared-for ending quite reverses this premise. As the lady with frayed nerve ends, Joan Hackett is convincingly twitchy, but she overworks the part to camouflage how underwritten the play is. In superior forms of suspense, the audience is tipped to what the characters do not know. In inferior forms, like Night Watch, the audience is in the dark and must wait, none too pleasurably, to find out precisely how it has been fooled.

THE DUPLEX. Black Playwright Ed Bullins is engaged in an ambitious cycle of 20 plays depicting the nature and quality of black life in the U.S. The plays seem to resemble sections of track stamped "destination unknown." This is the price of writing drama that is all middle, with no discernible beginning or end. Bullins is rich in mood, poor in plot.

A sizable segment of that after-hours world consists of drinking, whoring, gambling and fighting. Bullins would probably get frothing mad at any white (playwright or not) who said some of the things that he says about blacks. He disowns the Lincoln Center production of The Duplex as a "coon show," though nothing in the script indicates that the spirit of the play has been violated. As a slice-of-life playwright, Bullins carves out zesty evocations of drunken parties, card-playing cronies, the sudden sensual thrust and parry of the sexes. When he can carve out the palpitating hearts of blacks who epitomize and yet transcend blackness, he will have written the play he is so promisingly aiming at.

SHADOW OF A GUNMAN. Revivals can be triggered by several fallacies. One is that if some event makes headlines today, the knowledge that it has happened before, say half a century ago, will electrify and elevate playgoers and perhaps lead them to wag their heads sagely while muttering "Plus c,a change, plus c'est la meme chose!"

It does not take too nimble a wit to equate the hated Black and Tans of Sean O'Casey's 1923 play with their equally hated British army counterparts in Ulster, or the I.R.A. terrorists of that day and this. What has remained similarly unchanged is that this was fledgling O'Casey, his first produced play, and not remotely on a par with his poetic masterworks, The Plough and the Stars and Juno and the Paycock. Gunman shows the sidewalk artist in O'Casey, busily slapdashing off one colorful, funny-sad character portrait after another without really integrating them on the large canvas of the play.

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