New York Sheep in the Balcony "Sheep on the Runway," Helen Hayes Theatre, N. Y. C.

THE FIRST time I went to New York I wound up feeling not very good. Last May I walked it all, working on a photographic essay about people in the streets. A stocky man in a green T-shirt took a fancy to my camera while I was wearing it. He plucked it from my neck and told me with a smile he wasn't going to give it back. I watched him stride away. OK, I had insurance and it wasn't unexpected. My distracted wandering behind the lens had led me from Columbia to the outskirts of Harlem-a bad sense of direction took me from there to the nearest subway, at 125th and Lenox. I watched my camera dangle over the shoulder of the green T-shirt like a panfish headed for the table, or more precisely, the pawnshop. We'd been through University Hall together.

The first time I asked directions, an old lady at the newsstand in front of Grand Central Station shrieked: "You dumb freak! Freak! Can't you read? Read the goddamn sign!" Right then and there I knew I'd stepped into the big league city without a bat.

Last weekend, on my second trip to New York City, I left the camera behind. I was going to concentrate on the simple pleasures of the tourist. This time I wasn't going to be conned into seeing a movie by a Long Island sharpie. I was going to make it to my first Broadway show.

By Saturday night I'd given up. Wherever I called, performances were sold out and scalper's rates left my date and me with enough for a preztel but not for subway tokens back to NYU. The Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein was packed, the Knicks were in town and Madison Square Garden didn't answer. Theolonius Monk was weathering something in Canada. I'd had too many jackhammers that day for the Fillmore East to beckon, and even the movies-well, Zabriskie Point wouldn't open until Monday.

So my date and I were searching on 46th St. for some restaurant billing a black power operetta scheduled for 8:30 or so, Elvin Jones to follow. I had floated through the Modern, the Guggenheim, and the Met that day, tasting the colors in quick glances. I tipped my cowboy hat at Mrs. Hester van Primm as she walked out of the Hotel Plaza with 20 poodles on a leash, Yes, I was in a pleasant trance the whole day, and, as is my wont in that mood. I traveled down the streets turning circles, looking up at the clouds, balconies, birds, and flags. The city seemed just right. I'm quite susceptible to awe, being a country boy of sorts, originally.

We passed under a marquee and I stopped. "A new play by Art Buchwald...

"... Sheep on the Runway."

"I bet you're all sold out. Any standing room only?"

The usher was thin, patient, wise. A nice big leaguer.

"Naw, We got some seats left." He invited me to the box office.

"Six-fifty for the balcony..."

I turned to leave.

"... and four dollars for the second balcony."

Tickets firmly clenched, I skipped back to my date to give her the good news. I had looked around the lobby and seen some cigarette holders and jewelry. There were some galoshes too. That worried me. I didn't have a very clear idea of where I was. There were some pretty cheesy moviehouses nearby, and not a single theater with a play.

The night before I'd been to off-off Broadway, and now I thought I might be in some nether category for the awestruck. I was too frightened to ask the wise, patient usher (who had used all his considerable influence to get me in) whether, in fact, this theater was On Broadway.

WE HAD just enough time for two cokes, two hot dogs, and a knish.

We sat down, read the playbill (looked just like the ones back home) and noticed that the empty seats held the majority in the second balcony. A sleeper, I thought. Noted that the playbill marked Buchwald as a "humor conglomerate." And, indeed, the main attraction was a Buchwald conglomerate, if not exactly a play.

The action, in brief, was this: Joe Mayflower-Alsop (played by Arlene Francis's husband, Martin Gabel) visits a minor-minor American embassy high in the Himalayas which is corrupt but quite content. Joe sticks his famed journalist's ear to the ground and the drums tell him "this place is boiling underneath. I can feel it!"

Whereupon the domino theory is poked fun at. Joe's column is read in Washington, Washington sends military and pacification men out to solve the communist menace from the north, the northern menace is actually a CIA agent, and after coup and counter coup our own embassy ends up reeling under a U. S. bombing attack.

The lines, as I read my notes, are great. Barnard Hughes as General Fitzhugh (he played the mad revivalist-pimp in Midnight Cowboy ) shoves a Sears Rocbuck size military catalogue in the lap of Nonomura's Prince Gow. "See if there's anything in there that grabs you..."

Likewise, our pacification man offers the Prince some DDT: "It's been declared too dangerous for use in the U. S. A. but not anywhere else."

And while on the hotline to Washington, General Fitzhugh explains his confusing signoff: "Disneyland? That's our code word for Washington."

WHICH makes me wish that Sheep could have been done as a cartoon. There are enough familiar two-dimensional characters. The long-neglected ambassador is General Halftrack; the pacification program man is Dudley Do-Right; the wife is Debbie Reynolds in her new TV comedy show ("Oh, Mr. Mayflower, my husband didn't make you out to be a horse's ass."); the ambassador's daughter who organizes the students at Nonomura and goes to Radcliffe has a lisp and is straight out of The Impossible Years. And it is rumored that Art Buchwald doesn't really exist-that he is the unfulfilled dream of Walter Lippman, or better yet, Walter Lippman, disguised as a humorist.

Sheep needs a plot to usher the audience through the vacuums between jokes. The men and women on stage are superfluous, a fog between the audience and Buchwald's byline at the breakfast table. And the words, so funny when read, just don't work when they come from comic book characters on stage. Sometimes, the playwright in Mr. Buchwald comes creeping out, but he soon crawls back in. Buchwald often hints that something is really going to occur between certain characters, that a situation is leading to a plot. There is such a moment when the ambassador's daughter seems as though she is falling in love with the prince, but that moment dissolves at a joke about seducing the prince "for the FBI."

The dialogue consists of newspaper lines-hardly the way people speak. The jokes grow out of political jargon and do not arise from human relationships. But when the Prince replies "Horseshit!" to an American platitude about "a new spirit of pride in Nonomura." a human being is talking and it got the biggest laugh of the night.

When there is nothing between jokes, there develops this unbearable tension on the audience, knowing that it must laugh and laugh again for the show to be a success, for Sheep has nothing else to offer.

And soon, the jokes stop working. My mind wandered and I began thinking that all the art I'd ever seen was so much paint. New York was so much garbage, and I knew that the hot dogs were after my stomach. As I left. I didn't save the tickets, and had lost the urge to ask the usher the question.

IN THE playbill there was an article entitled "The Media Men." It listed a great number of familiar people, including Vice-President Agnew. But it left out Mr. Buchwald, who, if not for his columns, is revered as the sweet bumbling man with the frumpy suit and thick glasses who found it hard to talk about the death of Robert Kennedy on television. As did a great number of other media men. The article didn't seem to feel that the media men were very talented, but that they are easily devoured and replaced by a voracious public. I for one would miss Mr. Buchwald tremendously if he were to pass from the seene... indeed, his humor is irreplaceable. But the only thing that brought me out of the dumps after the curtain had closed was the incredible news of Agnew's day at the golf course when he beaned Doug Sanders. I laughed for two hours and went to sleep.

Damn! Agnew may have done it! He's living a Buchwald column before Buchwald can write it. Art Buchwald can be replaced.