Kataki (by Shimon Wincelberg) is a play, originally done on television (TIME, March 24, 1958), with two characters, one of them a Japanese soldier who speaks all but a few of his lines in Japanese. Marooned with him on a South Pacific island near the end of World War II is a bird-brained, teen-age American G.I. who chitters with naive notions and cliches. The Japanese is seemingly incapable of an ignoble act, while the American is a bundle of petty spites and treachery.
Playwright Wincelberg may not write like a champion, but he obviously believes in handicapping himself like one. What keeps his melodramatic gamble from bankruptcy is the elemental tension of man against man, as it is reflected in the mirror-simple playing of Ben Piazza, as the American, and the emotionally prismatic portrayal of the Japanese by old (69) Silent Screen Star Sessue Hayakawa.
The American and the Japanese are like Cain and Abel in the primeval jungle of human conscience. Quicksand sucks down the American; the Japanese hauls him out. When gangrene threatens the Japanese, the American pours his only packet of sulfa powder into the ugly leg wound. The pair learn each other's names—Alvin and Kimura. When Alvin moons about his girl in Sedalia, Mo., Kimura mimes the death of his wife in an air raid. In such scenes, Actor Hayakawa makes Kimura grow wordlessly in stature and sympathy. Actor Piazza cannot prevent poor, blathering Alvin from being a bore, but he does capture the pathos of his homesickness.
Once it nears its Auden-inspired moral ("We must love one another—or die"), Kataki is becalmed. For its first half, the play, however pawed, ticks with time-bomb suspense; toward the end, there is merely the tame metronome's beat marking empty theatrical time.