Theater: Indiscriminate Bombing

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It takes a certain concentrated foolishness to let a show bomb twice. We Bombed in New Haven did just that. It is now rebombing in New York.

When it opened at the Yale Drama School last year (TIME, Dec. 15), the play showed itself to be an anemic polemic against the war in Viet Nam, with little wit and less sting. Playwright Joseph Heller, of Catch-22 fame, has since cut and word-fiddled, but the show is basically the same on Broadway, only worse. In New Haven, the love-affair subplot was handled by Stacy Keach and Estelle Parsons. Keach looked virile and hungry, and Parsons had the amiably battered pliancy of a girl who knows she isn't getting any younger. As a result, the affair had a certain cozy credibility. On Broadway, these roles are played by Jason Robards and Diana Sands. Looking like a crestfallen road-show narrator for Our Town, Robards doesn't indicate that an atom of sex is dancing in his head. Sleek, sassy Diana Sands seems about as vulnerable as a Navy destroyer with guns blazing. They act together as if they had never met, let alone shared a bed.

The central story situation is the same: actors pretend to be Air Force bombardiers who flirt with the mimicry of death only to find that, one by one, they are really being killed on their outlandish make-believe bombing missions over Constantinople and Minnesota. The plot might well have been retrieved from Pirandello's wastebasket. Broadway these days is full of preachers who thunder that war is evil and that racial prejudice is hateful, but who seem not to have the slightest compunction about discrimination against good drama.