Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, The Girls Are Marching

Joseph Papp is highly receptive to current issues; he believes that drama should involve itself intimately with subjects that stir, fascinate and disturb people. Out of this concern came the first off-Broadway production of Hair and of No Place to Be Somebody, the black play that won this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Not surprisingly, Papp is the director and producer of the first musical related to the Women's Liberation movement, Mod Donna. A male playgoer is bound to approach a show like this with the trepidation of a little boy about to down a spoonful of cod-liver oil. He will be pleased to discover that Mod Donna is a bracing tonic.

The story is a Nineteen-Twentyish drawing-room comedy that concentrates on a menage-`a-trois: tycoon, wife and mistress. The other woman is the wife of the tycoon's business associate who has already bedded the tycoon's wife.

At this level, Playwright Myrna Lamb casts one ambiguous vote for hanky-panky. On the Brechtian Greek chorus song-and-dance level she casts one unambiguous vote for women's freedom. The chorus delineates the roles into which women have presumably been thrust and demeaned--cook, clerk, wife, mother and sexual plaything.

It is not necessary to agree with the agitprop to discern in Playwright Lamb a deft lyricist with barbed wit and a no-nonsense lucidity about contemporary man-woman relationships. Papp moves an able cast around with fluent precision; as the other woman, April Shawhan is certainly one of the loveliest warriors who ever enlisted in the battle of the sexes.

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