New Play in Manhattan

A Sound of Hunting (by Harry Brown; produced by Irving L. Jacobs) is Harry Brown's first play and, like his first novel, is about the war. But A Sound of Hunting lacks the substance, along with the timeliness, of A Walk in the Sun. It has certain merits, but almost no meaning.

Its main characters are a squad of G.I.s, battle-weary from weeks of fighting at Cassino, war-weary from years of Army grind. The day they are to be sent back of the lines for a rest, the least popular of them gets trapped under enemy fire. Anxious as the others are to pull out, they are held back by some mystical emotion of comradeship and even disobey orders in an effort to rescue their man.

Out of this morsel of plot and a minimum of action Playwright Brown somehow squeezes enough to keep an audience pretty interested. He does it largely through brisk talk and lively G.I. gags and through the human, antiheroic picture he paints of soldier life. But though he can squeeze out interest, he cannot distill feeling or significance. The theme of his play is a sense of comradeship which is not just part of a code and which tough, cynical soldiers can no more escape than they can explain. But Playwright Brown cannot explain it for them--or even make it seem real.

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