Unto Us No Child Is Born

By K.E. Kalen

ASHES

by DAVID RUDKIN

To have children is often a mixed blessing. To not have children is often regarded as an unmixed curse.

Compassionately, the British playwright David Rudkin shows us a man and a woman struggling under that curse. Colin (Brian Murray) and Anne (Roberta Maxwell) have been married for a few years and are childless. They have entered the bitter season of their relatives' and neighbors' titters and taunts. The couple consults a medical adviser, a "semenologist."

This somewhat smarmy fellow (John Tillinger) advises the husband: "Scrap your tight briefs for boxer shorts . . . Bathe your testicles in the coldest water several minutes at a time . . . Central heating probably reduces more male fertility more than any other factor in the West." The pair undergoes a series of fertility rituals, fecundity postures and time efficiency tests that are clinically presented and emotionally humiliating. Anne conceives, miscarries, and the couple is turned down on a try for adoption. If the sound of heartbreak is total silence, and the eyes of pain too desolate for tears, then Maxwell and Murray are most moving.

Where Playwright Rudkin eventually falters is in trying to make private grief a metaphor for public sorrow. In a long and wrenching monologue, he tries to link the childless couple's plight to the nightmare horrors of Northern Ireland. Nonetheless, Rudkin is a dramatist who welds theater to life as too few playwrights tend to do. With this production the Manhattan Theater Club reconfirms its status as an oasis of fresh drama under the venturesome leader ship of its artistic director, Lynne Meadow. She has been joined in this instance by Joseph Papp and his New York Shakespeare Festival in an occasion that does honor to them both.

T.E. Kalem

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