New Play in Manhattan

The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (adapted from his novel by Herman Wouk) comes off thoroughly good theater --and not least because it shuns the overtly theatrical. For stage purposes, Novelist Wouk has so backgrounded and built up the court-martial scene of his Caine Mutiny as to suggest a shipboard drama of events through a courtroom drama of character. Charles Laughton has staged the production with a superbly unswerving sense of the whole. Building slowly, the play at length walls in, not the court-martialed Lieut. Maryk, but his accuser, Commander Queeg, skipper of the destroyer-minesweeper U.S.S. Caine.

There is much, beyond the pulse of the story, to enhance the court-martial setup. The charge against Maryk of seizing com mand during a typhoon on the ground that Queeg was mentally ill -- is an un hackneyed one. Again, Maryk's lawyer, Lieut. Barney Greenwald, would far rather be prosecuting than defending his client -- and indeed wins him an acquittal by not defending him. Instead, he attacks others: first he twists a fatuous psychiatrist's tail, then twists the knife in an emotionally frayed and rattled Queeg. And there is the final celebration scene, a sort of moral coda in which Greenwald, more than mildly drunk, berates his own tactics and denounces the real villain of the "mutiny."

Theater tactics, like trial tactics, run to throwing a certain amount of dust in people's eyes ; and in places The Caine Mutiny Court Martial has been slicked up, speeded up, shaped to measure for that treasure house of behaviorism, a courtroom. But the maneuvers always have pertinence: thus, the easy laughs at the expense of the psychiatrist are an integral part of the trial itself, not just a fillip for the show. What is sharp in the play is all the sharper for what is deliberately flat; no one understands better than Director Laughton the counter-theatricalism of the quiet manner.

The most vivid conflicts in the play are self-conflicts: Queeg's agonized attempts to keep a grip on his emotions, Greenwald's rigid determination to put a hood over his conscience. As Queeg, Lloyd Nolan plays brilliantly, is as self-revealing when still in control as when losing control. Henry Fonda's sober courtroom Greenwald is in fine contrast both to Queeg and to Greenwald drunk. The whole cast, from John Hodiak's Maryk on, is admirable: out of the stylized nature of the court-martial has been forged just the right style for a theater piece.

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