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INDIANS. Playwright Arthur Kopit has joined the mea culpa crew with this play that argues that Americans were once beastly to the redskins, hardly a startling bit of information. The format is that of a Buffalo Bill Wild West show alternated with somber accounts of the humiliation and decimation of the Indians, but the segments never seem to gain any harmony of mood or purpose.
THREE MEN ON A HORSE. George Abbott directs a revival of the 1935 comedy about a composer of greeting-card verses (Jack Gilford) who whiles away his commuting hours by hunch-picking horses with uncanny clairvoyance. The cast is superb, and the entire production is polished to a high gloss.
THE FRONT PAGE. Robert Ryan plays Walter Burns, the tough managing editor of the Chicago Examiner, and Bert Convy plays Hildy Johnson, his top reporter, in this revival of the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur saga of newspapering in the 1920s. The play has a cornball period flavor that adds to the enjoyment.
A PATRIOT FOR ME. Playwright John Osborne tells the story of Alfred Redl, a homosexual officer of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire who was forced to commit suicide when it was found that he had been selling state secrets to the Russians. Osborne's voice is badly muffled, and he cannot seem to work up the passion to breathe inner life into the play.
Off Broadway
CRIMES OF PASSION. The late British playwright Joe Orton (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot) was much possessed by death, which he treats in these two one-acters with a grisly sense of humor. He died before he had mastered his craft, but rarely in recent years has the theater lost such an original imagination.
A SCENT OF FLOWERS takes a girl on a semipoetic, semiprosaic long day's journey into the night of her suicide. Looking uncannily like her aunt Katharine Hepburn, Katharine Houghton gives a tenderly well-wrought performance that has beauty, feeling and intensity.
FORTUNE AND MEN'S EYES is a revival of the 1967 prison drama, restaged by Hollywood Actor Sal Mineo in a version calculated to close what he must feel is a sadomasochism gap. Filled with the sight and sound of faces being beaten bloody, genitals being punched, bodies being raped, slugged, tossed and twisted in agony, this latest entry to homosexual theater is a carefully placed kick in the groin.
A WHISTLE IN THE DARK is Thomas Murphy's drama of a brutish Irishman and his four sons who move in on a fifth son attempting to flee their world of tooth and claw by moving to England. The play is full of the rude poetry of the commonplace, stating truths about human nature that one would often rather forget.
ADAPTATION—NEXT. Two one-acters, both directed with a crisp and zany comic flair Elaine May. Miss May's own play, Adptation, is the game of life staged like a TV contest. Terrence McNally's Next has a middle-aged man undergoing a series of humiliating pre-induction examinations.
TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK. An able interracial cast in a tribute to the late playwright Lorraine Hansberry presents readings from her works—journals, letters and snippets of plays.
CINEMA