It was a sadly perplexed crowd that walked out after the Poets' Theatre performance of Lyon Phelps' three-act verse drama "Autumn" last Monday night. We had gone prepared to wrestle with obscurities and be buffeted by lines of lofty poetic significance, but Mr. Phelps had imposed on us too much. If we had grasped the deep meaning of every symbol and responded fully to every profound line in his play we would have been left limp from catharsis, unable to leave the theatre. As it was we walked out, perplexed.

"Autumn" is the story of the return of a Prodigal Son to his New England home. (I capitalize the words because Mr. Phelps does not skimp on Biblical analogy. His play is not so much about a New England family as about a group of symbols and ideas which happen to be residing in the bodies of a New England family; his characters never speak for themselves, their earthly selves, but always for their symbolic selves, and for the author.) The son returns and stirs up the maelstrom of hatred and misunderstanding which is basic in his family. His eldest brother hates him; his sister commits incest with the eldest brother in the course of trying to persuade him to be reconciled with the prodigal; the second son, a parson, wrestles in agony with the problem of what to tell his flock about the prodigal's return; the father and mother are incorrigibly domestic and fail utterly to grasp the mighty symbolic drama being played before them. Soon the sister leaves town to have her child elsewhere, and the prodigal dies a Christ-like death (at least I think he dies, but there may be these who will dispute this interpretation). This is the substance of the action in the play; Mr. Phelps is teaching a lesson, manipulating symbols, not telling a story.

One doesn't find this out until the end of the play, however. For two acts "Autumn" does seem like a play about a New England family. There are plenty of symbolic overtones, to be sure, but one can grasp what is going on and be interested in the characters for themselves. Monday night, during the first two sets, one's spirits rose and one could tell oneself that this modern poetic drama wasn't so stiff after all.

But then Mr. Phelps hit us with the third act. The character one had tagged as the Prodigal Son suddenly began to behave suspiciously like Christ; the incestuous brother and sister began to look more and more like Adam and Eve; symbol pressed on symbol and character after character rose to speak weighty and prophetic words. It was too much. The New England family became a group of actors mouthing profoundities; the play, as a drama, collapsed. The gardener, who had previously had the quite sufficiently exalted role of Chorus, began to speak in the third act of "my seasons" and rose to the stature of God. In the presence of a stageful of prophets a mere Chorus must perforce rise in rank.

The trouble with "Autumn" is that it tries to say much too much and strives too hard to be significant. Every third line sounds as if it were the key to the whole play. To give all these lines their due importance, the actors were obliged to maintain a lofty and serious tone throughout. The play rolled on, inexorably significant, unbroken by so much as one shaft of humor.

Considered as theatre, "Autumn" does not rate very high. As poetry, however, it does much better. Mr. Phelps, I think, has mastered the difficulty of expressing conversation in poetry (if anything so doggedly exalted could be called "conversation"). His lines flow smoothly and naturally, and have real beauty at times. One need only read aloud a line like this: "Mother, mother, who is, what is, where is, God?" to realize that Phelps can write very forceful poetic speech. In fact the effective verse of the play almost compensates for the ponderous structure of its ideas.

The production Monday night was pretty good. One is tempted to blame the director for the relentlessly lofty tone of the performance, but this is more properly laid at the author's door. Donald Stewart as the eldest son and Edward Bacon as the prodigal were too fitfully passionate for my taste, but again I think the blame lies in the parts. Donald Mork, however, brought his excellent voice and presence to the similar part of the parson and turned in a much better balanced performance. Joanna Brown, too, did a better-rounded job as the sister. George Clark was spotty in the role of the Gardener-Chorus (-God?): at times he was excellent, but he pitched some of his lines too loud and swallowed others. The remainder of the cast did well; and everyone spoke the verse with authority.

It is whispered that "Autumn" is only one part of a trilogy. Perhaps if he confines himself in the next two plays to spinning out his already abundant store of symbols and ideas, Mr. Phelps can make something good out of his undoubted talent for writing verse speech. Perhaps, too, we will find out if the prodigal really died at the end of act three.