Ten Years After The Party

THIRTY years ago, when American intellectuals were talking European politics instead of the other way round, some of our better known play-wrights wrote with glaring naivete about countries and people they had no right to understand. Several noteworthy plays issued from this preoccupation-- Robert Sherwood's Idiots' Delight, Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine--but they were marked either by inaccuracy, as in Sherwood's case, or by vagueness, as in Hellman's. The heart of America's fascination with fascism was ignorance, and to be alert and liberal was less than to be knowledgable.

Eric Lerner's Ten Years After the Party deviates bravely from the rule about writing what you know, and the resulting incredibility--a product of both vagueness andinaccuracy--takes fully an act to overcome. Much in the '30's style, with a measure of Arthur Miller, Lerner has attempted a well-knit family drama tackling a coherent question: is exile a valid means of protesting repression? Lerner narrows in on this subject through the character of an 18-year-old anti-Nazi whose conviction derives largely from jealousy. The secondary theme is thus the effect of personal motives on the legitimacy of political sentiment.

Martin, the anti-Nazi, leaves Germany in 1936 and returns ten years after, now an officer in the British army. There ensues a short, implausible, and generally drippy re-encounter with his brother Klaus (who covets a Nazi flag, significantly over-lit) and the play ends with the suggestion that Martin, for leaving the country, may be responsible for his parents' concentration camp deaths. In a sense this is rather courageous material for a student playwright, but the net effect is to downgrade courage on the scale of virtues and to uplift subtlety, the quality most sorrowfully absent from Ten Years After the Party.

The triumph of the soap operatic in Lerner's play looms inevitable from its start, but fails to obscure a certain intelligence, and a surprising discipline, about the whole thing. The production, directed by Lerner, looks like it came in well under the Experimental Theatre's customarily stringent budget. The performances are all right, I guess; there's no designer's credit on the program, but the set explains why.