Theatre Dirty Hands at the Loob, this weekend and next

THE FLAWS in Loeb productions seems to be something built-in, permanent, like original sin. One would like to write them away, especially when a fine play like Dirty Hands is just waiting there to disturb people and set their preconceptions spinning about in ugly chaos. Unfortunately, even a heavy dose of blind faith (I want to believe!) can't change this jeremiad into a hymn to Loeb rediviva. The massive painted backdrop, the portentous music between acts, the stilted acting all stand between this Loeb company and effective communication of Sartre's conception. This does not imply that David Boorstin's production of Dirty Hands misinterprets Sartre; it merely suggests that through slavish efforts at virtuosity within the Old Theatrical canon, these people have denied the goal of effectiveness and missed their audience.

"Virtue is not the same as effectiveness," says Hoederer the Pragmatic revolutionary to Hugo his idealistic secretary and future assassin. This dichotomy runs behind the bourgeois display and ultimate vacuity of this production, just as it engenders the futile dilemma in Hugo's life. Hugo is the rich boy turned class traitor and "intellectual anarchist." He seeks the authentic act to validate his totally pure ideology of revolution. Caught in a staggering struggle with his past and his ideal, his identity and his apotheosis, he ends up with "dirty hands." He stamps out the hydra of revisionism, in the person of Hoederer, but he can only shoot Hoederer after a conflation of damning circumstances have, so to speak, unhinged him. But is he really unhinged since he doesn't actually pull the trigger until jealousy, a bourgeois passion, has set off some passional reflex deep down in his basically bourgeois soul? He sees Hoederer, the ideological enemy, kiss his wife. He shoots Hoederer. Has he acted? Has he validated anything?

I found myself wishing a less modern setting for this morality play than even imaginary World-War II Illyria. Calling Hugo the "kid" seems awkward, but maybe this reductionist slang is finally invigorating in a play so freighted with meaning. What remains dazzling about Sartre is that he can turn a simple story of political intrigue into a lofty, if verbose, piece a these. Lucy Winslow as Hugo's frivolous wife Jessica stands in obvious juxtaposition to Dorothy Gilbert, the doctrinaire, disciplined party comrade Olga. They work very well as decorative comic factors in the play-its Nora Charles and its Ninotchka. And, in Hugo's great moments of choice, the two women become the primal forces between which Hugo must choose. Jessica is now Milton's Delilah, just as Olga is the hard-nosed Lady in Comus. Dirty Hands is a relentless moral treatise and a superficial "plot,"

Boorstin's production gets bogged down in the superficialities, primarily, I suppose, because the material resources at hand at the Loeb make it so easy to attend to detail. There is fine detail in the costumes by Jacqueline Berger. Steven Downs has come up with an ingenious set, staggered diagonally on three levels. Each act thus has an interesting microcosmic quality, since it is played out on a small, elevated stage. As an act ends the light breaks off suddenly, creating an effect of structured progression when action is renewed on a different platform. Lighting and sound are all up to snuff.

Given this polish, why doesn't the whole thing take flight? One reason, perhaps, was the unsure touch shown by most of the actors, all of whom at some point fumbled their lines. The tendency of minor actors to overact was painfully evident in John Archibald's appearance as the martinet Louis, and Peter Brogno's portrayal of Prince Paul. Alongside Paul Sprechler's Hoederer, Warren Knowlton as Hugo generally had his part under control; he seemed physically right for the part, even when his delivery of the rhetoric took on confused and querulous tones. Lucy Winslow, however, was throughout a saving grace, fresh, natural, unaffected.

But, unfortunately, when ideology becomes camouflaged by a striving for surface effect, even this production's occasional virtues of acting and technique are not in themselves enough of a reward.