When Richard Wright wrote "Native Son" he said something important and worth saying. When he and Paul Green made the book into a play, they didn't pull their punches. They said straight out that a society that wrongs Negroes is responsible when a Negro wrongs a white. The cast assembled by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre associates believe in what they're doing. But none of them seem to realize that a good idea is no substitute for a good play.

What "Native Son" lacks most is unity. Substituting a large number of short scenes for the conventional three-act division may be novel, but it gives about the same impression as our Hero jerking across the screen in a 1910 movie. Even Canada Lee's powerful interpretation of Bigger Thomas, the Negro murderer about whose guilt the play tries to center, fails to draw it together. The authors may even have realized this, when they wrote the message that the play itself should have got across, into an over-emotional and over-long speech by the defendant's attorney in the next to last scene.

The settings are perhaps the play's greatest virtue, but they lack subtlety, and tend to stand out by themselves, as original and dramatic, rather than taking their proper place as a backdrop for the action of the play.

"Native Son" has all the elements of a good play, although it remains for someone else to put them together. But for anyone who doesn't feel that we've got to do something about the Negro in America today, it's not to be avoided, and for anyone else it's worth seeing.