New Play in Manhattan

The Hidden River (adapted from Storm Jameson's novel by Ruth and Augustus Goetz) is a split-level kind of play. Laid in France in 1950, it is partly a mystery piece over who informed on a young Resistance fighter in World War II, partly a moral inquest into types of French behavior under the Nazis. The dead man's vengeance-crying mother will not rest till she has found his betrayer; simultaneously, the playwrights set up a kind of hearing--not just for outright heroes and traitors, but for one Frenchman with a certain tolerance of Germans during the war, for another with a certain tolerance of collaborationists after it.

It is not the mystery or the morality that gives the play any life. A split-level whodunit should have more concealed and built-in features: who is guilty is very soon obvious, and as a moral drama, The Hidden River lacks flesh and innards. Not only has the problem created the people, instead of the other way round, but the characters are shown too much under mere scrutiny and too little under stress.

What the play does have, in its second half, is some good old-fashioned emotionalism. It works up steam when what the people feel about betrayal shifts to what they feel about the actual betrayer. Mother faces her son's murderer; brother stares wildly at brother; a man cowers; a voice implores; it remains to be seen whether blood is thicker than bloodshed. The effect may be familiar, but the moment is theatrical.

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