Live Ghost

VERA -- Georg Kaiser -- Alliance ($2.50).

This tragi-conundrum, by a famed, pre-Hitlerian German playwright, might be called a ghost story with a live ghost. The story is told by the "ghost," Boris, in a tormented letter to his first wife, Vera. Its tone is best exemplified by a last scene in which Boris conducts Vera through an imaginary hell, where he himself is chief exhibit among the damned.

Boris is a Paris waiter, condemned to live under an alias. At his story's beginning, on the eve of World War I, he is a young Russian lieutenant, drunk with passion for soldiering and his bride Vera, a Russian heiress. His ghost-delusion begins at the Russian disaster in the swamps of Tannenberg. About to be captured, afraid of committing suicide, afraid of being called coward, he exchanges uniform and identity with a dead private.

During his internment in Germany he is drafted as farm handyman and lover of an old hag; shame makes it easy to disown his old identity. In Paris, after the war, he inspires in his employer, a cafe owner, the delusion that he was sent by Providence to marry his gentle daughter. Boris holds out against this scheme until he hears that Vera was killed by the Bolsheviks. Shortly afterwards he meets Vera. She does not recognize him. They meet again, even more intimately. Still she does not recognize him.

Why Vera failed to know him, why Boris failed to introduce himself, and the anguished outcome for all concerned, are ghostly matters that only true Moscovites can understand. The publishers predict that Vera will rival the popularity of Rebecca. For the unsusceptible, Vera will rank chiefly as a provocative tour de force.

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