New Play in Manhattan

Touchstone (by William Stucky) deserves respect, if very little praise. The play, which closed at week's end, concerned a small Southern Negro boy given to seeing visions. The community gets het up, but the boy's doctor father insists that he needs psychiatric care. Playwright Stucky could not give his ticklish subject matter effective or even very intelligible form. Though the play seemed mostly a bald clash between reason and faith, it raised other problems, and was only interesting when it stopped raising problems and dealt with a human situation. Yet, for all it lacked, it approached both racial and religious matters in a low-pitched, unsentimental way. He has still to master his medium, but Playwright Stucky is at least not the slave of its cliches.

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