New Play in Manhattan

End As a Man (adapted from his novel by Calder Willingham), though an off-Broadway production, is the first work that the new theater season can take any particular pride in. Far from perfect, and indeed a good deal less than a play, Playwright Willingham's picture of life in a Southern military academy is for two reasons generally good theater. Some of it is well written, and much of it is extremely well acted.

It is a brutal picture, with a core of horror imbedded in its accounts of mere hell-raising. All but one of the principal characters are fairly scarifying as future warriors or even as future citizens. There is a blabbing prig, a conniving misfit, an ingratiatingly evil Jocko De Paris (Ben Gaz-zara), a master of midnight ceremonies violent enough to mean court-martial and expulsion.

A behavioristic chronicle with scant interest in good behavior, End As a Man is the work of a gifted scene-writer who has still to become a playwright. Some of his play runs too long, some of it goes too far, while thematically the whole thing goes nowhere in particular. Mr. Willingham's play does not reveal how much the military academy itself is to blame--either through what it fosters or what it fails to prevent. But the play offers a number of telling, harshly humorous incidents; and thanks to the acting (notably of William Smithers, Ben Gazzara and Albert Salmi), it provides a real sense of human beings.

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