DEFENDING THE MURDERER WITHIN US

Slowly the New York theater season takes shape. The most interesting work is happening Off Broadway, with a new Sam Shepard play, “The Lie of the Mind,” in preview at the Promenade Theater, and a new Wallace Shawn play, “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” causing arguments at the Public.

From the reviews, Shawn’s play provides a disturbingly plausible defense of the we’re-all-murderers theory of human nature, according to which the Nazis are actually rather refreshing in their lack of hypocrisy. Presumably Shawn doesn’t believe this himself, but his two leading characters do, and he leaves it up to the audience to refute them.

Frank Rich in the New York Times calls it a “brave” play that poses “a central moral question of our age--forcing us to wonder whether we could and would counter the spurious polemics of a clever Fascist like Lemon in real life. I can’t remember the last time I saw a play make an audience so uncomfortable, and I mean that as high praise.”

Julius Novick of the Village Voice wasn’t so sure about Shawn’s method. “There is a certain pleasure in being made uncomfortable, if it is done artfully. By admitting guilt we expiate it. But if we enjoy being disturbed, does that make the whole endeavor pointless? We can only hope not.”

Pity the poor critic who guessed wrong. Methuen has just published “Plays in Review 1956-1980,” containing opening-night notices of the most important English plays of that period. Samples:

W. A. Darlington on Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” (1958): “One of those plays in which an author wallows in symbols and revels in obscurity. Give me Russian every time.”

J. W. Lambert on Edward Bond’s “Saved” (1965): “There comes a point when both life and art are irretrievably debased, and Edward Bond’s play in this production is well past that point.”

Hilary Spurling on Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (1967): “Nothing if not bland. . . A single idea is developed without imagination and in language of tedious brutality.”

The book also contains numerous samples of critics who guessed right--such as Harold Hobson, who called Stoppard’s play “the most important event in the British professional theater of the last nine years.” But then critics are supposed to be right.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Zelda Fichandler of Washington’s Arena Stage, to David Richards of the Washington Post: “The theater has made me accept my own humanity, reduced my level of guilts. Since I accepted so much aberrant behavior in plays, I was finally able to accept myself as one of the characters of the world.”