New Play Off-Broadway

Call Me By My Rightful Name drew rousing newspaper salutes for its author, Michael Shurtleff. "Off-Broadway gives us a playwright," sang the News. "Honest, thoughtful, probing," called out the Post.

"Quivering with vitality," cried the Herald-Tribune, "and full of humor!" As a form of encouragement, such acclaim made sense: Call Me By My Right-fid Name offers enough good things to promise better ones. Moreover, during Broadway's flabbiest theater season in years and a week when one play closed after opening night and another should have. Call Me might less be tested for gold than treated as manna.

Call Me is the story of a trio of ill-adjusted young people who emerge as a triangle--a Columbia graduate student (Robert Duvall), his undergraduate Negro apartment-mate (Alvin Ailey), and a questing girl (Joan Hackett). It comes quickly to life in scenes that reveal the Negro badly bruised with race resentments, the girl rather sophomorically looking for an honest man, and the graduate student thinking that he is one in his bellowingly individualistic, care fully tailored misfit way. Their talk can be caustic, their clashes sharp, their belligerent defenselessness vivid. The play's best qualities are its avoiding a sermon ized tone for a bull-session one, among bull-session immaturities, and its trying to push beyond specific race problems to a basic human-race one. Its serious and growing weakness is that to what is largely familiar material it brings little rewarding development, so that together with repeating others, it more and more repeats itself. Once the paint wears thin, there is the merest plywood behind it; but the paint itself is fresh.

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