Concentrated Extract

THE ANGEL THAT TROUBLED THE WATERS And other Plays--Thornton Wilder--Coward-McCann ($2.50).

"1. I am about to make my point. . " . 2. I am now making my point. ... 3. I have just made my point"--time-honored prescription for effective exposition. No such precepts trammel Thornton Wilder, apparently indifferent to getting his point across. Says he in a luminous foreword to 16 playlets, "I have composed some forty of these plays, for I had discovered a literary form that satisfied my passion for compression. Since the time when I began to read I had become aware of the needless repetition, the complacency in most writing." The form he discovered requires but three minutes and three characters to refute a theory of faith without reason

(The Flight Into Egypt), or to establish inevitable repentance (Hast Thou Considered My Servant Job?) "No idea was too grandiose--as the reader will see--for me to try and invest it in this strange discipline."

But with his customary charm he gives other than serious artistic justification for the compressed plays--"their brevity flatters my inability to sustain a long flight, and the inertia that barely permits me to write at all. And finally when I became a teacher, here was the length that could be compassed after the lights of the House were out and the sheaf of absurd French exercises indignantly marked with red crayon."

The verdict is that he may burn midnight oil as often as he pleases, tossing off his frothy extracts, granted he always prefaces them as well as this: "Almost all the plays in this book are religious, but religious in that dilute fashion that is a believer's concession to a contemporary standard of good manners. . . . Our Lord asked us in His work to be not only as gentle as doves, but as wise as serpents."