Stop Watch on Life

By T.E.K.

AS TO THE MEANING OF WORDS by MARK EICHMAN

Abortion is not a subject about which people have no opinion one way or the other. As to the Meaning of Words uses no real names, but it is a documentary drama based on the 1975 Boston trial of Dr. Kenneth Edelin in which he was convicted of manslaughter for an abortion he had performed, a jury decision that was later reversed. The new play, at Stamford, Conn.'s Hartman Theater Company, marks the debut of Mark Eichman, 27. He sticks fairly closely to the reported facts. As a result, Act I, at least, verges on a classroom dissertation on abortion.

In the second act the verbal fencing of the prosecutor (George Dzundza) and the defense attorney (Paul Collins) markedly steps up the dramatic tempo.

One key witness (Theodore Sorel) testifies that the defendant, Dr. Winston Gerrard (Earle Hyman), held the aborted fetus inside the patient's uterus and counted off three minutes by the operating-room clock. In a devastating counterstroke, the defense attorney proves that the doctor could not have seen the clock--it had been removed for repairs.

Sociologically, Playwright Eichman is most astute in suggesting that the transfer of power from the Boston "blue-bloods" to the Irish Catholic majority has actually accentuated New England's narrow puritan ethic. As Ned ("Scooter") Ryan, Dzundza viscerally endows the prosecuting attorney with the instincts of a fox in a hen coop. Always grave and commanding in presence, Earle Hyman has to wait to the end of the play to deliver the doctor's passion ate plea for the right of a woman to terminate her own pregnancy.

Once again, a regional theater has taken a commendable gamble on the sort of theme that gives a Broadway producer the shudders. T.E.K.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.