[Childress's one-act play "String"] was suggested by the Guy de Maupassant story of the Norman peasant Hauchecorne, called "The Piece of String." The short story is concerned with the ironically narrow balance between guilt and innocence, and Maupassant, with that crisply inpersonal cynicism that is almost the crest of Romanticism, treats it with a brief wit and a long compassion. The play does not.

The play in fairness is completely different. Only the memory remains. Miss Childress has set her play at a black block party picnic. The characters are nicely judged. The Cadillac-bar-owning bully, the happily socially weaving bourgeois matrons, and the cryptomiser, accused of theft; these people are part of an incandescently recognizable scene. It was the recognition of that scene that was itself interesting.

The fault of the piece was simply that it was too prolonged for its subject. The Maupassant short story makes its...