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...

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