Think of men fighting in a fallout shelter after a nuclear attack. A gruesome situation, and a brilliant one for a play, but since the idea carries its own dramatic weight, the playwright must beware of substituting public terror and public slogans for his own private statement.

With some melodramatic exceptions, Frederick H. Gardner's new play avoids these risks. Fairly success fully, The Rain Never Falls its focus narrow. The middle class family that builds its shelter, the working class family that seeks refuge there, the itinerants and strays who stumble in--these and not abstract horror or atrocity stories are what Gardner writes of.

Despite this restraint, I was disappointed in the play.

I disagree completely with Gardner's outlook, and those who think that it's not what you say but how you say it in things artistic can skip this part of my review and read only my comments about the production, which I enjoyed. It seems to me that The Rain Never Falls makes very little sense if you don't buy some of Gardner's beliefs; his essential assumption being that the great attack will somehow come about because of internal evil, that the greed and weakness of our society will push us over the brink. I cannot share this archaic, retributive morality; nor do I buy the proposition that all evil is alike and from a common source.

The moral state of America has almost nothing to do with its present precarious hold on the future: a better America, a fairer America, a less commercial America, would be in much the same international plight. And it seems to me that the greedy desire of a shelter owner to keep out the people who have not been able to build their own refuges is a different kind of evil from that which prompts men to push missile buttons.

I agree with Gardner that one is faced with a choice to build or destroy in modern America. The first stranger who cames seeking refuge in Michael Hooper's shelter is one of the construction workers who built it; later, there are flashbacks about workers building shoddy apartment houses. Shelters, Gardner seems to say, are only a part of a civilization that builds for death, not for life. Agreeing with this, though, is not the same as agreeing with Gardner's untenable conclusion that shoddy, cheap, commercial values are the causes of nuclear war.

All these differences of opinion really matter to a play like Rain Never Falls. I simply do not believe that the people struggling in this shelter fifty feet below the ashes of Queens are responsible in any way for what has happened to them. For me, therefore, the play lacks meaning.

I said I enjoyed the production. Gardner gives some excellent dialogue to the working class figures and itinerants who fill up the shelter. As the construction worker who brings his wife and son to the shelter Renato Rosaldo is sympathetic and competent. His wife, Myra Rubin, has, in the face of some maudlin lines, great dignity.

Marelli's son, R. Terence Galvin, does some of the finest acting in the play; only his haste in speaking spoils the naturalness of his performance. A group of construction workers in one of the play's flashbacks deserves praise, as does Eric von Salzen, who plays an effete actor with wit and great skill.

The best pieces of acting in this play coincide with its best-drawn roles, and Gardner's failure in portraying the middle class owners of the shelter is painfully obvious; he has made the Hooper family caricatures, and bad ones at that. (One wonders ho he would have sketched a working class shelter owner.) John Walton as Michael Hooper tries manfully to blow life into his dead role by force, bluster, and over-acting; his wife, Frances B. Barbour, faces the same problem with similar results.

Chris Hobson, who plays a Brechtian sage and narrator whom Gardner has rather artificially grafted on to his plot, is properly stilted, abstract, and didactic, but he seems totally out of place. This role should be cut.

It must be obvious that this is an uneven play. Director David Lelyveld has exploited the excitement of his situation to the utmost but too often he succumbs to touches of purest melodrama. The basic cause of unevenness, though, is Gardner himself, who is by turns eloquent, windy, perceptive, funny, pathetic, cynical, and utopian.

All these qualities churn together in the play's last scene, which mingles moving speeches and bathos to wind up tangled in a resigned, yet utopian conclusion. The Rain Never Falls is--fatal word--an interesting play.