Begin the Reddin

Keith Reddin remembers a phone call from his university playwriting professor John Guare soon after the adulatory reviews of Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. "Congratulations," Guare said, sounding relieved finally to be passing the mantle, "you've just taken my place as the oldest living most promising young playwright."

Since leaving Yale's graduate program, Reddin, the thirty-five-year-old actor-playwright, has been churning out one devastating indictment of the communal American breakdown after another—among them Life and Limb, Rum and Coke, and Life During Wartime. His newest, The Inno- cents' Crusade, at the Manhattan Theatre Club, turns a teenager's unsuccessful attempt to get into college into a frightening hallucination of everyone's worst fears of being too mediocre to make it.

Could this be Reddin's own misplaced fear? His latest effort could remove any lingering self-doubt, creating the box-office crusade he deserves.

S. B.