Theater: Goodbye, Cruel World

Slow Dance on the Killing Ground, by William Hanley, encourages three characters, two men and a woman, to tell the audience all about their operations. They discuss not physical but psychic scars—traumatic surgery performed by that mad cruel doctor, life.

A young Negro of high IQ and frayed nerves has stabbed his prostitute mother to death. A German ex-Communist has deserted his Jewish wife and child, abandoning them to torture and death in a Nazi concentration camp. An unmarried but pregnant N.Y.U. coed has lost her way to a Brooklyn abortionist and stumbled into the German's desolate stationery shop to sit on one of the counter stools where each character recites his or her autocryography. The theatergoer is thus once again in the weepy, hysterical presence of collectors of guilt, dispensers of self-pity, proclaimers of futility.

The play is evenly divided between what Playwright Hanley does badly and what he cannot do at all. He cannot initiate action, only total recall. His play has already happened before it goes onstage. His characters are not people but composites researched out of faded newspapers; they are set forth, not in the music of evocative monologues, but in the unrelenting din of talk, talk, talk.

The worst thing that has happened to Hanley is something that he could not have foreseen—the opening of Murray Schisgal's therapeutically hilarious Luv. Sorry-I-was-ever-born plays now sound like hollow parodies rather than dour profundities; since Luv raised its satirical whoop, playgoers are bound to lessen their self-commiserating indulgence of misery. More than ever a playwright who intends to woo his audience with some tale of woe will have to do it out of an intensely felt, intensively rendered personal experience.