New Plays in Manhattan

No Time for Sergeants (adapted by Ira Levin from the novel by Mac Hyman) offers a really good evening of simple-minded fun. Less a play than an episodic romp, it tells of Will Stockdale, an incorrigibly good-natured young hillbilly who is inducted into the U.S. Air Force. Will puts his foot in his mouth as nonchalantly as though it were his pipe; he triumphs over every crisis by never knowing he is in one; he stands the Air Force on its ear by looking everyone guilelessly in the eye. So backwoods as not to know that a sergeant is a recruit's natural enemy, Will all but kills his own sergeant with kindness. He all but gives the Air Force psychiatrist ulcers through his unshatterable normality. In time he sets forth with one of the zaniest of crews on one of the most demented of flights. Only after that--and perhaps only by comparison--does the play itself seem earthbound.

No Time for Sergeants follows a classic pattern of rube-conquers-all, but it follows it less for satiric than for outright comic ends. Will is not just the simpleton who confounds the sages; he is also the good boy who can lick all the bad ones, the farm boy who can drink city slickers under the table. With everything soundly proceeding at a comic-strip level, No Time for Sergeants becomes a fine, boisterous exercise in sustained improbability, in morning-fresh outrageousness. It has a kind of healthy, folkish madness: it makes the Air Force seem like something personally invented rather than anything ever experienced or observed; it makes sex--on the rare occasions it refers to it--seem rather like a good breakfast food. As Will, Andy Griffith has enormous lumpish charm; Roddy McDowall is just the right foil as his buddy, Myron McCormick an amusing, long-suffering sergeant. Peter Larkin's attractive sets are often amazing bits of engineering, and Director Morton Da Costa has polished the show to precisely the right roughness.

A Roomful of Roses (by Edith Sommer) is this season's entry concerning the child of divorced parents. The 15-year-old girl comes to visit her mother, who years before ran off with another man. She comes arrogantly, with her chin set and her lips cold. As her mother, stepfather and some neighborhood young people do everything they can to thaw Bridget out and win her over, it becomes plain that she not only resents her mother. Her relations with her father are also twisted, her whole life is lonely and askew, her disdains are defensive, her withdrawals constitute flight. What she needs, of course, is love, and there is no lack of it at curtainfall.

A Roomful of Roses nowhere skimps Bridget's plight, but it far from gloomily dwells on it. However valid, Bridget's seems a matinee or televised grief. And Playwright Sommer wants to have her ache and eat it, too. She stirs into the play a full cup of adolescent humor, a level teaspoonful of small-boy remarks, a lightly beaten offstage comedy husband and the juice of one uninhibited maid.

Thanks to good acting, a fair amount of the kid stuff is amusing. And on the serious side, Patricia Neal as the mother and Betty Lou Keim as Bridget do very well by their roles. But even as popular play writing, A Roomful of Roses remains uncomfortably two-toned. It should be more serious or less, more adroit in its emotional scenes or more honest. It is not sharp enough theater to play fast and loose with reality.

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