Scary Bedtime Story

Good drama and absorbing theater are often intermingled and sometimes confused with each other. In solid drama, the playgoer is frequently told truths that he either has forgotten or never knew. In effective theater, the playgoer is sometimes seduced by the winning way in which lies can be told onstage, and by emotionally charged sophistries. This brand of engrossing theatricality is precisely what one gets in Child's Play, a melodramatic first play by Robert Marasco, 33, that resembles nothing so much as a scary bedtime story.

The setting is a Catholic boys' school. The boys are seemingly possessed by a plague of violence, savaging each other brutally and without ostensible cause. They stalk along the stairway and confront their teachers, lay and clerical, with an oppressively arrogant silence that makes the generation gap look more like an apocalyptic abyss. For better or worse, three lay teachers are closest to the boys. One is Dobbs (Pat Hingle), an American Mr. Chips, a cuddly Teddy bear of a man who sees his boys as substitutes for the sons he never had. His antithesis is Malley (Fritz Weaver), a martinet of Greek and Latin, a forbidding aristocrat of learning waging a slightly paranoid struggle for excellence in an age of slipshod egalitarianism. With tongues as foils, this pair fences throughout the play, and the acting level is simply sustained perfection. The third teacher, Reese (Ken Howard), is a puzzled innocent, a gym teacher earnestly trying to isolate the virus of evil that seems to have infected the boys.

Temper of the Times. The virus takes a toll that may make some playgoers blanch. There are three bloody beatings in which one boy has an eye gouged out and another is strung up dangling from the chapel cross. At play's end, one of the three teachers has been driven to his death.

To stress what Playwright Marasco does well: he writes with fluent literacy and he can create a strong part with a spine in it. He traps the temper of the times, the currents of rebellion and uneasiness that almost visibly pollute the daily air. His clerical teachers are paralyzed by the lack of the very authority that they ought to represent. One priest, Father Penny (David Rounds), provides comic relief by the scabrously funny asides he delivers on his own so-called vocation. But Marasco strains rather portentously to make his troubled school a metaphor for a sick .world, and fails. Despite the fact that Marasco once taught in a boys' school, he seems not to know that children are astonishingly acute judges of their teachers, or perhaps the knowledge did not suit his plot. At any rate, logic is the last guest to bring to this breath-taking show.

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