Satire

Only three Americans were there, but their presence was significant. Along with 867 Russians last week, they witnessed the start of a new phase in U.S.-Soviet relations. Russia threw a fast satiric punch at the U.S., and the three Americans hardly knew how to take it.

In Moscow's Satire Theater the curtain rose on a new three-act comedy entitled Mr. Perkins' Mission to the Land of the Bolsheviks, written by ex-Vice Commissar of Foreign Afiairs Alexander Korneichuk, a topflight Russian playwright.

"Mr. Perkins," the play's leading character, is a rough-&-ready Chicago sausage manufacturer. He has journeyed to Russia to "see Mr. Stalin and learn the weaknesses there must be in this system." Coarse, shrewd, unlettered, but basically goodhearted, Mr. Perkins is not a bad fellow. He visits a collective farm, tours the front, where he eats his own sausage, sent to Russia under Lend-Lease. He and the Russians understand one another. But "Mr. Hemp," the U.S. correspondent accompanying Perkins, is a slippery, prying, anti-Soviet rat.

During the week, U.S. correspondents who flocked to see Mr. Perkins' Mission puzzled over possible U.S. counterparts to the stage characters. The crude but levelheaded Mr. Perkins might well be a roughed-up composite of all the frankly capitalistic U.S. businessmen who have visited and charmed the Rusians: ex-U.S. Ambassador Joe Davies, the late Wendell Willkie, ex-WPBoss Donald Nelson, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Eric Johnston. But the nasty U.S. correspondent--a vicious roasting of all American journalists who dare to suspect or find one flaw in the Soviet system--was harder to place. Most obvious counterpart in Soviet eyes: the Reader's Digest's William L. White, foreign correspondent and author (They Were Expendable), who accompanied Eric Johnston to Russia last summer. Fortnight ago, Reporter White's Report on the Russians was violently lambasted in Pravda as a "fascist stew" (TIME, Dec. 18).

This week TIME Correspondent John Hersey cabled that Mr. Perkins' Mission was "the strangest literary coincidence of the war. Korneichuk wrote the play last spring. Eric Johnston and William L. White visited Russia during the summer. In the play there are no similarities to Johnston and White either in physical appearance of the actors or in characteristics as revealed by the lines. But to Muscovites, 'Mr. Perkins' is Eric Johnston and 'Mr. Hemp' is Bill White. And that is how it will be, as long as the play runs."

In Manhattan, Correspondent White drawled: "I hope the play is a success."

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