It's doubtful that the new season will produce a more shocking and disturbing play than John Hopkin's LOSING TIME, or one with stronger women's roles than those played by Shirley Knight and Jane Alexander. But the question is, what is this play and why does it want to shock us? "Losing Time" deals with two friends--Joanne (Alexander), a swinging bachelor girl, and Ruth (Knight), a divorced mother of three. Late one night Ruth shows up at Joanne's apartment filthy, bloody and hysterical; she's been mugged and sexually abused by a creep in the New York jungle. Joanne calms her down, cleans her up, calls her ex-husband, Steve. When Ruth gets on the phone she's horrified when she realizes that Steve is making love to a girl as he listens to her description of the rape.
The unseen Steve is one of the four men in play who are pathetic, revolting, vicious or all three. Joanne and Ruth become lovers. In the second act they entertain two men (Tom Mardirosian and Bernie McInerney), whom they first go to bed with and then insult, humiliate and finally terrorize. It is a vicious and painful scene, and so is the third act, in which Joanne tries the same intimidating tactics on Tod (Tony Roberts), who has asked Ruth to marry him. Joanne is almost killed when Tod turns on her. As a battle of the sexes, "Losing Time" makes "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe?" look like "Boy Meets Girl." But "Virginia Woolfe" is a coherent play; "Losing Time" is a discordant, unnerving cry of anger and pain.
Hopkins belongs to the post-Pinter generation of English playwrights who see a world of exploded, mortally wounded values. His "Find Your Way Home," which played on Broadway a couple of seasons ago, dealt with a man who left his wife for another man. "Losing Time" is the converse of that situation, but in it all tenderness, all gentleness has gone and the play simmers and smokes with a ferocious brew of negative emotion--disgust, nausea, horror at what human beings want from one another. That nausea is the truly shoking thing about Hopkin's play, much more than its violence or its savagely foul language, especially in the mouth of Jane Alexander's Joanne, for whom gutter talk is a club with which she wreaks vengeance on the men she needs and despises.
BLACK ANGUISH: There's a kind of crazy courage in the absolute negativity in "Losing Time," all of whose characters are awful people- even the put-upon Ruth, who finally can't even accept Joanne's love, but leaves to find herself. This sounds like the credo of the new feminism, but its taste here is bleak and ashen. No relationship seems really possible for these frightened, weak, flailing people who are one another's predators and victims, who commit rape with every dirty epithet and scornful seduction. These are, in Beckett's phrase, the lost ones, and Hopkins leaves them no real hope. Such black anguish generates a bizarre power, but "Losing Time" lacks clarity and finally mauls you and leaves you feeling ravaged, much like Ruth at the beginning. Edwin Sherin has directed it strongly for the Manhattan Theatre Club, and it's powerfully acted-- by the men in their thankless roles and by Knight and Alexander, two outstanding American actresses who show a lot of guts in sinking their teeth into such tough red meat. JACK KROLL

Photo accompanying the article: Sixth page black and white of Shirley in long black dress and Jane in shorts with hand extended toward Shirley- Knight, Alexander: Is there sense in the shock?