Off Broadway takes amateurish turn

By William Glover

AP dramo critic

NEW YORK The Phoenix and Public Theaters, two of Off Broadway's most ardent seekers of fresh drama, have simultaneously dug up a couple of clinkers.

Two nasty big-city detectives rough up a young drug addict and his homosexual buddy in "A Prayer for My Daughter," which officially opened recently at the Public. It was seen at a preview.

Just what writer Thomas Babe is getting at with a lot of ramshackle, vulgar exposition and cheap melodrama never becomes clear. Maybe he has seen "Kojak" too often.

Robert Allan Ackerman directs the phony realism depicted by George Dzundza, Jeffrey De Munn, Alan Rosenberg and Laurence Luckinbill.

A tinhorn poolroom hustler is at the center of "One Crack Out," which opened recently before at the Phoenix's current residency, Marymount Manhattan College.

The author, David French, lives in Toronto and with a different script won a prize for the best Canadian play of 1973. This one rates him as an earnest amateur.

The plot, which is not worth synopsis, involves in addition to its sleazy un-hero, a street floozie, a gambling collector who likes to break fingers and several other types who used to hang. out in William Saroyan saloons.

Daniel Freudenberger directed the cast of nine, among whom only James Greene generates fair credibility.

The year 1978 so far has produced nothing but theatrical mistakes. Three losers arrived on Broadway and, with this pair, Off Broadway ties the dolorous score.