Recitation in Manhattan

I Knock at the Door proves a thoroughly engaging reading version of the first volume of Sean O'Casey's full-flavored autobiography. In an arrangement by Paul Shyre, six people seated in front of lecterns recount a late Victorian Dublin childhood that ends when a twelve-year-old boy has "learned poetry and . . . kissed a girl." The boy was not just any Dublin child--beyond the gifted writer he would some day be, he was threatened with blindness; and in a shabby and fiercely Protestant home was watching his father die.

The boy's already hard-beset mother was caught between the doctor's strict orders that the child be kept out of doors and the rector's badgering insistence that he go to school, Sunday school and church. The climax of childhood comes with Sean being caned at school and rebelliously striking back.

But there is humor too--often right in the midst of misfortune, as in what might be called "Coming Home from the Funeral." And there is small-boy adventure, whether with girls or tram rides or being sent to the tobacconist's for "an ounce of Cavendish cut-plug." O'Casey everywhere respects the dignity of childhood as a full existence in itself, as he recaptures a boy's hazy sense that a world offered by Victorian grownups as square is, all the same round.

If here and there on the stage the story loses a certain inward glow, it gains in outward color from snatches of song or the interplay of street voices. With the performers--particularly George Brenlin as Sean and Aline MacMahon as the mother--providing a resonant voice box, I Knock at the Door wisely puts adroit storytelling ahead of theatrical effect. If four walls and a passion can make a good play, almost as much can be had from six chairs and a prose style; and an ounce of Cavendish cut-plug can be worth a pound of routine theatrics.

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