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Take a Giant Step (by Louis Peterson) is the sort of play that is not done often enough, though it ought to be done better. It deals honestly with a young Negro's scuffle with adolescence, with growing pains that involve growing doubts and recognitions, with a tragicomic moodiness and incoherence, and with that giant step toward maturity that not only moves ahead but also turns a corner.

Spencer Scott lives in a comfortable middle-class home (in a white neighborhood) with sympathetic parents. But he is 17; he is in trouble at school, he is bothered by sex, he is at odds with his family. And there are difficulties over his race: a white world that cannot accept him as a suitor is bewildered over how to accept him at all. He chafes and broods and breaks loose; he talks to prostitutes in a bar, talks to one of them in her room; is crushed by the death of his grandmother (well played by Estelle Hemsley), restored to life by an ardent young widow.

Playwright Peterson has captured Spencer's seventeen-ness admirably, and High-School Senior Louis Gossett plays him well. There is a fresh, humorous smack to the writing--that sense of proportion so vital in dealing with a character who lacks one. But only his humor and his hero are Playwright Peterson's own; they function inside a framework, indeed a virtual cage of cliches. Where Spencer is typical but real, his experiences are merely trite, and sometimes clumsy and protracted. What makes Take a Giant Step uncommon in terms of Negro life--its middle-class outlook--is precisely what makes it over-familiar in terms of adolescence.

At Home with Ethel Waters is a fair way of spending the evening out. The latest Broadway star to become a Broadway soloist, Ethel Waters should have unusual qualifications for going it alone. She has a genuine personality, whether warmhearted or rowdy; she can perform as dramatic actress or comedienne; and as a singer, she is a notable album of old favorites--Dinah, Am I Blue, Stormy Weather, Takin' a Chance on Love.

At its best--as when she and her accompanist, Reginald Beane, freewheeling-ly get together over Lady, Be Good--At Home with Ethel Waters is delightful. But the part proves greater than the whole. The star offers more than 20 numbers, in a program that mingles the atmosphere of the nightclub, the concert stage and Broadway without achieving the full flavor of any of them.

Most crucially, doing proper justice to the 20-odd numbers nine times a week could only leave her voice in shreds; hence she has to pipe down, to substitute byplay on the actress' part for brio on the singer's. She is always personally pleasing, and sometimes more; but At Home with Ethel Waters finds Ethel Waters insufficiently at home with her material.

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