October 17, 1968

Theater: Heller's 'We Bombed in New Haven' Opens

By CLIVE BARNES

Novelist's First Play Is at the Ambassador

Liebman and Holland Dominate the Action

play is a machine for setting up a dialogue between a playwright and his audience, and a critic's job is to throw on a little oil of interpretation to help it on its way. But what if the dialogue first set up in the critic's mind is too confused to let him interpret as well as he would like to.

You see I am not at all certain what I felt, and even less certain what I think, about Joseph Heller's first play, "We Bombed in New Haven," which opened at the Ambassador Theater last night. What do you imagine I should do? Toss a coin to be completely decisive and then lie a little. I am told that many members of the public and those people called producers like notices that mugwump on a fence. To Burgundy with them; I intend to vacillate a little.

I have tried to make up my mind. I first read the play before seeing its original production in New Haven, where it was excellently given by the Repertory Company of the Yale Drama School. I reread it, in a slightly revised version, when it was published by Alfred Knopf, and of course I saw it again last night. If I was forced to a judgment I would call it a bad play any good playwright should be proud to have written, and any good audience fascinated to see.

Mr. Heller's ideas seem to be morally and politically quite unimpeachable, and happily for Broadway quite fashionable. He is against killing people, he is against bombing, he is against the war in Vietnam and, I suspect, against the moral blindness that permits millions of people to treat such a war as a kind of spectator sport to be watched on TV until we are no longer completely sure whether we are seeing our sons and brothers being killed on a newsreel or a few Hollywood actors biting the dust on the Late Late Show.

"We Bombed in New Haven" is a play that has actors pretending to be actors pretending to be airmen. Captain Starkey, a tired regular officer (or perhaps a tired regular actor), is sending out his unit on bombing raids. Today it is Constantinople (it's not Istanbul, it's Constantinople), and tomorrow it will be Minnesota. The aim is to obliterate the target, and the target always is obliterated. But some airmen don't return. Some are killed.

But of course we know, don't we, that the theater is a place of make-believe. We know that they are not genuine airmen and that actors are never killed on active service, not even John Wayne. Equity wouldn't like it, rehearsal time would be impossible, and the blood would mess up the stage.

Mr. Heller's actors know this as well as we do. A Sergeant Henderson about to be killed in the second act--the Major, who is Starkey's superior, carries the script around with him so the cast knows the plot--is not worried about the pretended death, but about the quality of the part he has on stage. Like every actor, he thinks he is worth a better role. Still, it's a job.

But then a corporal is killed on a mission, and Henderson tries unsuccessfully to find him off-stage. Perhaps he has been killed. Perhaps it is not all make-believe. Henderson is scared.

The possibilities of this Pirandellian device of two planes of reality set against each other as in a mirror image are used by Mr. Heller for all they are worth. But although we know that all the world's a stage and all that jazz, the device is neither especially original nor meaningful.

Despite the scattering in the dialogue of actor's camp to mingle with barrack room bull, and the frequent quotations from Shakespeare (when wars were wars and poets would die for them), Mr. Heller does not play fair with his image of an embattled stage.

The air of fantasy was never sufficient to convince me of a phantasmagoric world in which actors might not know where the grease paint ended and the blood began. And the idea itself is a clichè, while the dramatic technique expressing it (and this a first play, remember) is a little rough, a little clumsy. When finally Mr. Heller commits the sentimental coup of showing Starkey sending his own son on a mission, the message of our corporate responsibility becomes almost insupportable in its obviousness.

What then is good? First, the play's ambitiousness; it is a play that tries to extend the theatrical experience of most Broadway playgoers. Second, most of the writing and all of the atmosphere.

Mr. Heller is a writer to the tip of his keyboard. His dialogue flows out, natural, real, amusing, absorbing. Here is the writer of "Catch-22" flying high, high on words of his first theatrical flight.

Then even more there is the atmosphere of the play. Mr. Heller has caught the anarchic mood of the present, the callousness, brutality, cynical jokiness, dissent and protest. Every sentence spat out, and many of them are defiantly funny, speaks of today and demonstrates a profound moral concern for what is happening in our own theater of the world.

For this Broadway production Mr. Heller has made a few changes, but perhaps not enough, and it is a pity that the two starring roles are not so well performed as they were in New Haven. Jason Robards, with his disappointing moose face and friendly voice, did not convey the passionate panic of Starkey in the way that Stacey Keach did in New Haven, and Diana Sands was far too beautiful and desirable for Ruth, the coffee girl, originally played by Estelle Parsons with such friendly, battered charm.

But, as perhaps in New Haven, the play is dominated by Ron Leibman and Anthony Holland playing with antic zest and despair their original roles of Henderson and Corporal Bailey. Mr. Leibman goes from the flip to the tragic in a most moving performance, and Mr. Holland conveys a haunted urchin humor and will to survive that is deeply impressive. As the Major, William Roerick was I thought too conventionally authoritarian to convey the Machiavellian menace inherent in the role, but this may have been due to John Hirsch's rather stiff direction.

Finally, all I can say is that this is a play that people should see and make up their own minds. Any way you look at it, this is a pretty remarkable theatrical debut for Mr. Heller. I hope he stays around our theater for a long, long time.

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