New Play on Broadway

The Wall (by Millard Lampell; based on John Hersey's novel), rather than enclosing something dramatically, restricts and obstructs it. The harrowing chronicle of the Jews of Warsaw, first made ghetto captives by the Nazis, then robbed of homes and dignity and freedom until in enormous numbers they were sent "East" and fiendishly robbed of life, explodes its horrors over and over again. Its nightmares are vivid upon the stage; the mere sight--through the smoke of gunfire--of the Wall speaks volumes. But what power The Wall commands comes from the tale rather than the telling, from scattered incidents rather than a sustained whole, and comes a little, also, from the memory as playwright.

One source of trouble is that The Wall is an adaptation, something replanted in alien, resisting soil. With The Wall, the spatial element is an essential 'one, which the stage, unlike the cinema, cannot convey. The Wall in the theater proves neither personal in appeal nor panoramic in effect; it is too diffused to have impact as a story, too restricted for vast horror as a scene. A Diary of Anne Frank, by remaining the chronicle of a girl and confining its tragedy to a garret, could expand a family's fate into that of an entire race. But in stage version of The Wall, the mass and weight of John Hersey's novel are lost, while a steady dramatic undertow is lacking.

The Wall suffers, too. from appearing, as it were, between perspectives--years after the scarehead moment of horror, when anguish nullifies distance, and too soon for historical tragedy, when art provides it. But form and perspective apart, The Wall is simply not well enough written. Adapter Millard Lampell gets no leverage into language; his words do not heighten or deepen or darken, are never laconic or poetic or terrible. Rather than quivering with a Whitmanesque "I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there." Lampell's lines come all too close to the sentimen tal and the stagy. The Wall is most effective--is indeed very effective--where it is most documentary, in brutal public scenes between Jews and Nazis. A rabbi doing a little ritual dance with a bride somehow evokes more than occurrences that freeze the blood.

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