New Play in Manhattan

Semi-Detached (by Patricia Joudry) concerned the occupants of a two-family Montreal house. It was a house divided by prejudice--by the sniffiness and anti-Catholicism in an English-speaking family, by the rigidity and fear of worldly ways in a French-speaking one. For a while the play dribbled along in terms of trivial snags and snubs and slurs; then Playwright Joudry took to sounding louder and darker chords: tempers boiled over, a violin-playing hand was broken, the young girl in one house had a troubled love affair, a small boy was drowned.

Then, at last, the two families got all choked up with fellow-feeling. But by then the play itself was choked with clumsy staging, clumsier plotting and pleas for tolerance. The pleas were well meant, but the tragedy seemed as ill-founded as the bigotry, and a few sharp moments were lathered into a soap opera that closed at week's end.

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