My first reaction to Jack Gelber's New Play: Rehearsal, now at the American Place, is the fervent hope that Mr. Gelber will spare us the sequel, Jack Gelber's New Play: Play. The most distressing part of the current show, whose title ought to be self-explanatory, is the play that his group of actors and other stage folk occasionally get down to rehearsing, in between long bouts of palaver about what the play means, what theater means, what being an actor means, and so forth.

Yet, I did not mind Mr. Gelber's little theatrical exercise as much as my colleagues apparently did. Yes, the dialogue is utter trash, but I suspect that that was the aim. Actors, especially the seedy, out-of-luck bunch that people Mr. Gelber's theater, do tend to mistake the language of their work—soap operas, commercials, and the like—for intelligent speech, and they do go around, if they're not careful, saying things like "we're all in this together."

Mr. Gelber obviously knows his theater folk, and some of his observations in this new work are deadly accurate…. His show may not be much as drama, but as a learning experience I can, from my own days as a theater groupie, vouch for its authenticity.