[John Guare] is a master of calculated irrelevancy. His is a world of misunderstandings and half-truths, a world of the most astonishingly logical illogicality. Deeply influenced by the theater of the absurd, and playwrights such as Ionesco and N. F. Simpson, Mr. Guare is a most promising young playwright. This double bill ["Cop-Out" and "Home Fires"] is a strange Broadway debut—a mixture of confidence and diffidence. It is also one of those evenings that, disconcertingly, while full of laughs is eventually unsatisfying.

Mr. Guare's humor is black, but not savage. "Home Fires," the first of the plays, is a wry little sketch about a farcical funeral. It is Armistice Night in 1918. In Mr. Catchpole's funeral parlor a strange family is gathered: Mr. Smith, a policeman with an impeccable Teutonic accent; his daughter, Nell Schmidt, and his son, Rudy Smythe.

The joke of the piece is of the German family, here in 1918 trying to disguise its origins and Mr. Guare plays around with it most imaginatively. The dialogue has a crisp zaniness to it and a gentle smile-provoking wit.

Strangely enough the humor does not seem to have a great deal of connection with life….

This is a pity because, of all our young playwrights, Mr. Guare is perhaps the most adventurous. "Cop-Out" demonstrates this most graphically. It is two plays intertwined. The first play concerns a cop who has an affair with a kind of professional demonstrator, undergoes vasectomy in the belief that it will help him in his chosen career, and finally, disillusioned, shoots the girl. The play is funny, but not quite funny enough, the motivation is more like a cartoon punch line than a human insight.

The countertheme to this play, which winds around it and through it, is a manic joke about the cinematic vision of the police dick, out to get "Mr. Big," and whatever else he can along the way. The idea here is frankly satirical. A woman's cat has been slain and the dick is determined to find its killer.

He gets involved with the classic femme fatale, even caught up in an Off Broadway play—giving the author a chance to write a none too sharply pointed caricature of "The Beard"—before eventually the femme fatale dies in his arms and he continues in his quest of Mr. Big.

There is no relationship between the two plays other than that of juxtaposition and contrast. It is an interesting stylistic device, but here rather a barren one, while it might have been worthwhile if one theme had provided a counterbalance to the other, so both could by inference comment on each other. But this chance seems to have been missed. Once again the writing was often funny, but always I got the feeling that too much talent was being chased by too little experience, and that Mr. Guare was not yet in his prime….

"Cop-Out" is a flawed evening, and one that will annoy many. But I think it is far from worthless. There are some failures that are more rewarding than successes, but whether we can afford to have them on Broadway is itself a sort of black comedy.