New Plays in Manhattan

The Cave Dwellers (by William Saroyan) are broken-down performers camping out in a crumbling, abandoned East Side theater. A done-for boxer, a beat old clown, an ailing old actress are joined by a sweet young girl and a man with a trained bear and a wife who gives birth to a baby. By day they lie abed, or street-beg, or in desperation steal milk. By night they act out their old roles, philosophize, soliloquize, dramatize the day's rebuffs, fall asleep and dream.

With his first Broadway play in 14 years, Saroyan is clearly back at the same old stand, making the same old pitch -but without his onetime showmanship. He was often soupy and boozy about the down-at-heel in the old days; but at his best, as in The Time of Your Life, he had an alcoholic gaiety and verve, and a real knack for brewing instant-vaudeville. The poet in him might slump or the philosopher babble, but the prankster sufficiently triumphed.

In The Cave Dwellers, Saroyan is no longer a high-spirited toastmaster to waif-dom, but its long-winded poet laureate. There are the usual variety turns, but not much seems cockeyed or even imaginative. There are sad-eyed little gallantries instead; and even when Saroyan half-mocks at stage doings, he seems half-mawkish. His people are not just too good to be true, but mostly too good to be interesting. Their one message is love, love for one another; all is love, the secret of the theater is love, even hate is love. All this, however devoutly to be wished for, not only remains fairly dubious as fact; it never soars as poetry, or gets moving as drama. Saroyan's words are too many and too vague; the dialogue, at moments, even sounds as if the actors were unsure of their lines. As it happens, the actors are extremely good. As staged by Carmen Capalbo, the production provides lift: Barry Jones makes a fine-flowing aria of his unhappiness, Eugenie Leontovitch a bright nonsense piece of her stage memories.

Theatrically, it would not matter if Saroyan wrote first with an eraser -to wipe out reality -if afterwards, with a pen, he created magic. But this play has little magic: only a stab of pathos, now and then, in a wilderness of plight; or a flash of color, humor, poetry amid constant murmuration.

Nature's Way (by Herman Wouk) is a loud farce, full of rib-nudging situations, about a young musicomedy composer and his wife. It opens forte, with the wife six months pregnant. It next reveals that the young couple are four months married. Then the composer's homosexual collaborator appears, to lure the husband to Venice as a better place to work. Among other callers in the expensive, brick-walled penthouse are a very modern and very muddled obstetrician, a very airy and very ruthless lady decorator. Eventually there is a second homosexual, and ultimately a batch of shoddy theater folk.

Nature's Way seems one more frantic farce that relies for its laughs on gamy subject matter rather than witty treatment, and that, when its back is to the wall, literally has the bricks come flying out of it. What chiefly seems odd in all this is that Herman Wouk should be the author. But as the show proceeds, it becomes plain that there is a message in its madness -that with every tasteless gag, Wouk is bopping whatever repels him as newfangled or decadent, including Picasso.

If the whole thing is fairly deplorable, it is clear enough why. Had Playwright Wouk meant primarily to amuse, his theme would have demanded not the ripe tomatoes of noisy, tinny farce but the sauce tartare of a satiric comedy of manners. If his concern, on the other hand, was really not manners but morals, and his mood not amusement but anger, he should at least have wielded an honest whip, have created a significant world. As it is, in Wouk's exalting nature's way as opposed to society's waywardness, his approach seems no more gay than serious. In fact, it seems chiefly commercial.

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