Theater: Penwiper Papers

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Slapstick Tragedy. Tennessee Williams can sift the soul's gold from human dross. Unhappily, this double bill of one-acters. which closed after seven performances, is almost pure dross.

The Mutilated brings on a pair of New Orleans floozies who have had a falling-out. One is a dead-broke wino (Kate Reid) who has been barred from her room in the Silver Dollar Hotel. The other (Margaret Leighton) has suffered a "mutilation"—one of her breasts has been removed. Reid has al ready carved this sad fact on the wall outside Leighton's apartment. Bawdily, brutally proud of her own breasts, she has herself, of course, been carved up by life. Kate Reid gives a stridently able performance, but is too self-assured for an alcoholic, and this throws the play out of emotional kilter. Leighton is poignant as only Leighton can be: her sky-blue eyes hold rain. But Williams plays his mood music of longing and loneliness by rote.

A grotesque phantasm of further mutilations follows. The Gnadiges Fraulein is a deaf ex-diva (Leighton) who loses one eye and then the other to the coca-loony birds of the Florida Keys, whom she battles for throwaway fish from incoming sloops. A cocaloony bird struts around on stage looking rather like a giant pelican with a Ph.D., and an Indian in a red, white and blue monokini war-whoops things up. The locale is "the Big Dormitory," and on the porch of this flophouse rock two marijuana-smoking harpies, a slatternly clown (Kate Reid), who runs the joint, and a local society editor (Zoe Caldwell), who seems to have escaped from a flour barrel. Miss Caldwell is an auspicious new acting presence on Broadway. But the play is a rubber-dagger stab at theater of the absurd that lacks lonesco's lunacy or Pinter's menace. It seems to have come less from Williams' pen than from his penwiper.