Waking Them Up at Night

The dialogue awakened cafe scents of strong smoke, dry cognac and refracted thought ("Suppose you die and find out that the dead are only the living playing at being dead")And the story of an intellectual mamma's boy Communist up against a tough, cynical but gallant revolutionary was shot through with Marxist analysis. With such qualities Jean-Paul Sartre's Crime of Passion seemed an unlikely play for TV. But viewers in the New York area saw it last week, in a full-length and absorbing production, well acted by a cast that included Claude Dauphin and Betsy von Furstenberg.

The Sartre piece (seen on Broadway ten years ago as Red Gloves) was the latest Play of the Week, eighth in an admirable series on New Jersey's WNTA-TV. The series presents a different taped play every week (six evenings, plus Sunday afternoons), usually relying on past Broadway productions and topnotch Broadway casts.

If Sartre's Communist theme would have chilled most network programmers, WNTA's earlier choices would have set their teeth to chattering. So far, The Play of the Week has dealt with such themes as drunkenness and sexuality in a priest (Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory), sterility and infidelity (John Steinbeck's Burning Bright), infanticide (Medea, with Judith Anderson), and clerical tyranny (Paul Vincent Carroll's The White Steed). Says Producer David Susskind: "We have none of those pernicious and aggravating conditions and taboos that you get everywhere else on TV." Most memorable example to date--WNTA's unbowdlerized production of Jean Anouilh's sex farce. The Waltz of the Toreadors, whose aging lecher-hero is fond of leaning forward to tickle young bosoms with his medals, meanwhile delivering lines not usually heard from TV gag writers: "Science ought to find a way of putting women permanently to sleep; we could wake them up for a while at night; then they would go back to sleep again."

Play of the Week's effort to wake up viewers seems on the way to commercial success. It has attracted seven sponsors, who cover 70% of expenses. The average play costs only $40,000 to produce, partly because players take relatively low salaries ($750 for stars). Eventually, NTA plans to syndicate the taped plays to stations around the country.

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