First of all, let's leave ancient history out of this. In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, the playwright is not confronting us with those noble Greek and Trojan warriors that Homer and others sang of. The proper names are retained--Priam, Hector, Aeneas, Achilles, Ulysses, and the rent--but any further resemblances are purely coincidental. Cressida does not even exist in the Illad; and the sagittarial hero-god Pandarus was not debased into a pimp until Boccaccio latched onto him.

Next, let's not invoke Chaucer. His Troilus and Criseyde is the greatest long narrative poem in our language, and it is also the source of Shakespeare's lve story. But here too the dramatist radically altered the personalities of Chaucer's characters, and adopted an alien, discursive approach.

Now the really notable stimulus for this play was Shakespeare's phenomenally prophetic knowledge of 20th-century man and his so-called civilization. He wrote the play for us of today. It is as topical and timely as tomorrow's headlines (or rather tonight's since we no longer know whether there will be any tomorrow).

No more is rottenness confined to the state of Denmark. It has became global, and may well become universal. Knowledge is infinite; wisdom is finite. And for the first time in history, man's knowledge has now surpassed his wisdom to use it. The outlook is bleak; and never before has man so needed Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.

Doubly welcome, then, is director Jack Landau's valiant attempt to mount the work; for most professional troupes dare not tackle its special difficulties. Landau began by placing his American Shakespeare Festival production in an American Civil War setting. Those who know my firm dislike of decking out Shakespeare with tricky gimmicks may be surprised, but I go along with his decision gladly.

The point is that Troilus can be validly set in almost any time and place. Ancient Troy is of course possible. But so is the Spain of the 1930's of Korea of the 1950's or Berlin of the 1960's. Of all Shakespeare's plays, it is actually the least dependent on a visual setting; and it loses least over the radio of phonograph.

At any rate, the Civil War is a perfectly viable solution: the Trojans are the Confederate Gray, and the Greeks are the Union Blue. Appropriately, Robert O'Hearn designed for Troy a neo-Doric portice such as often found in Southern architecture; and, for the encamped Greeks, a covered wagon and pup tents, complete with offstage harmonica.

The director's chief problem, however, is the text. The work is magnificent as thought, but it is deficient as a play. The incidents are diffuse and not well related, as such threads as there are end inconclusively. The work lacks the focal personage of two it badly needs. All these soldiers are gathered, but Priam is no Lee and Agamemnon is no Grant, not to mention an Alexander of a MacArthur. Nor is the work mainly about Troilus and Cressida any more than Julius Caesar is mainly about Caesar.

Furthermore, men do almost all the talking. And Shakespeare has let them harangue at high pitch and at great length. They rant and sermonize; they like to say things twice, and to explore abstractions. Shakespeare also overloads their speech with lots of heavy Latinate words and forms that he never uses anywhere again: orgulous, corresponsive, conflux, tortive, insisture, oppugnancy, propugnation, assubjugate, unplausive, rejoindure, embrasures, commixtion, deceptious, constringed, concupy, and so on.

Troilus is, in short, Shakespeare's most cerebral, most philosophical play. It takes its place right alongside the "disquisitory" plays of Shaw; in fact, if Shaw had been an Elizabethan, he would have written this work.

No other play of Shakespeare has a more strongly unified theme. Troilus puts is most clearly, in a characteristically double statement, when he says "that the will is infinite and the execution confined, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit." It is the disparity between theory and practice, reason and emotion, ideals and shortcomings, order and disorder--Greeks and Trojans. And an undermining factor is Time--"envious and calumniating time," "injurious time."

But despite the unity of idea, the loose and experimental handling of incident and structure and diction creates a barrier for an audience. Since there are no leading roles, no performer can either make or ruin a production. The play is decidedly a "company" show; and thus the director must impose a consistent point of view.

Landau has not tried to present a tragedy. All the editors and commentators who place Troilus among the tragedies clearly have no idea what tragedy really is. Troilus is comedy, but very sour comedy. Kenneth Tynan recently seconded Orson Welles' view that Shakespeare was suffering from venereal disease during the period in which he wrote Hamiet, Troilus, and Measure for Measure. Such hypothesizing is dangerous; for that way madness lies. Yet it is true that these plays all present sexual relations as vile and tainted.

Within the spectrum of comedy, Troilus offers much latitude. From this production there emerges a satirical approach, which, though not quite consistently applied, is eminently workable. Carrie Nye's Cressida, first in a lovely gray gown with salmon stole and parasol and later in sultry red velvet, is a southern belle-wether of wantonness (I half expected to hear the Duke of Mantua singing "La donna e mobile" in the wings). And Hiram Sherman brings the suave relish of a Kentucky colonel to the role of Pandarus.

Ten van Griethysen makes Troilus into an effete poseur who has obviously just read The Sorrows of Young Werther. The only trouble with this interpretation is that such a Troilus would never even have survived basic training after being drafted into the Trojan army.

Paul Sparer is a stuffed-shirt Ulysses who delivers his two lengthy disquisitions on degree and on time with imposing sonority. During the first, the satirical touch comes when Patrick Hines' gruff Agamemnon clearly doesn't suffer garrulity gladly and impatiently drums his fingers on the table.

William Larsen's Nestor is a tiresome Polonius gone even more senile. And Thayer David gives a masterly portrait of Ajax as a bloated, redfaced, blusterer who stammers over his plosives--all brawn and no brain.

Donald Davis' Achilles and Colgate Salsbury's Potroclus are smooth, beautifully adjusted performances. There is no attempt to hide their homosexuality; in fact, their spiritual and physical love is made quite obvious, yet without a trace of effeminacy--which is precisely right for the bravest of the Greeks and his protege. The comedy here lies in their identical wardrobes: whither thou goest, I will go; where thou Iodgest, I will lodge; and what thou wearest, I will wear.

The side-line role of Thersites functions as the Chorus in the play. For all his vilifying and blaspheming, he is the person who sees the truth and states it, that man had succumbed to warring, lechery, idiocy, and hybristic vainglory. Donald Harron is unforgettable in the part. But Landau may be unwise to make him pick his nose, hawk into a spittoon, and mix coffee cups with the slop; it is not easy for an audience to acknowledge the wisdom in the speech of a man with such repulsive personal habits.

The final touch of satire is a ripenorting skirmish in shoot-em-up Western style, with rifles cracking and artillery bombarding, with the Southern mansion blown to bits before our very eyes, and with Thersites treacherously shot dead in the back (as an echo of the earlier slaying of Hector).

Troilus can never be wholly successful in the theatre. But it remains more intriguing than some of Shakespeare's more mountable works. I advise you to do homework at least to the extent of reading the text, and then to visit this courageous production. You may not get another chance until the next centennial of the Civil War.