Operation Rehash

Dissertation is not drama. Between hard covers it may pass as a Ph.D. thesis; on the open stage it is a cruel test of audience patience. In recent seasons, a firm of legalistic factmongers -- Hoch-huth, Weiss and Kipphardt -- has invaded the theater. They shuttle between distortion and documentation, rehashing past history and seasoning it generously with the catchup of guilt. Each of these playwrights is a displaced pedant who pretends to be stretching the mind. In actuality, he is merely inviting the audience to have a good cry.

In Peter Weiss' Marat/ Sade, the tear-jerking was decorous and concerned the plight of social revolution. One was expected to sob a little more audibly at Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, since, by the playwright's 15-watt intellectual lights, Pope Pius XII had it within his power to have prevented the murder of 6,000,000 Jews. Weiss rejoined the tear-bucket brigade with The Investigation, a static charade in which stand-up German tragedians testified that they were merely following orders in the massive extermination of the Jews.

Now with In the Matter of J. Rob ert Oppenheimer, Heinar Kipphardt of fers audiences at Lincoln Center's Vivi an Beaumont Theater the chance to weep over the renowned physicist who in 1954 was deprived of his security clearance. The three-man board rep resenting the Atomic Energy Commission sits in courtroom-style judgment as the testimony unfolds like an in terminable dream. Lawyers, friends, enemies discourse on Oppenheimer's Communist relations and friends, on his in spired leadership of the team of physicists who produced the atomic bomb, and on his reluctance to lend himself to the crash program for the hydrogen bomb.

The play is as inert as a stone, and Jo seph Wiseman as Oppenheimer is mannered, overly European and brittle. One sees in him neither the passion for pure science nor the intellectual arrogance that one feels were intrinsic characteristics of Oppenheimer. The play, if it is to qualify as drama, ought to tingle with the anguish of a man torn between his country and his conscience. Instead, it is misted over with sadness -- as of a man or woman deeply drawn to two equal loves, who must, in the nature of things, lose one.

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