BLOW-UPS:

ABOUT HALF-WAY through Arthur Kopit's nuclear war comedy End of the World with Symposium to Follow the protagonist, who has been commissioned to research and write a play about nuclear war, meets a Pentagon general off-the-record at a foggy rendezvous. The official confesses that he has no idea of how to bring the arms race under control." Stop me," he begs.

Unfortunately, Kopit has got it all backwards. He should be the one on his knees begging the audience to "stop me before I write again." After a few blissful months in which the obsessional torrent of plays stories and movies on the nuclear issue seemed to have been staunched, the American Repertory Theater's decision to resurrect this once-flopped problem play shows that the hypnotic fascination nuclear war exercises on intellectuals is as strong as ever.

It's not so much that the threat of nuclear war is unworthy of examination as that no one has had anything new to say about it since Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Just look at the details: Colonel Jack D. Ripper, the good doctor, the Soviet doomsday machine. Not only did Kubrick do nuclear armageddon first, he did it right, eschewing white-knuckled sentimental despair for ballsy black comedy--and unlike Kopit's play, Kubrick delivers on his premise with the end of the world.

Though Strangelove has passed into our national vocabulary, artists from JoAnne Akalaitis to the cabal of Hollywood dignitaries behind The day After have all imagined that they could do what Kubrick couldn't: influence the course of the arms race. Fearlessly armed with the facts and logical arguments, but rarely a smidgen of dramatic or narrative strength they can call their own, the anti-nuclear advocates carry on despite 20 years of null impact on American or Soviet policy. It's ironic that until very recently, both this nation's nuclear strategists and their foes still relied on vintage 60's ideas, one set from the Rand Corporation and the other from Columbia pictures.

Kopit's play is almost a paradigm of the burgeoning genre of "Nuclear Lit." The brain-deadening pattern lack much variation, having been set in stone in Strangelove: introduce an outsider to what one journalist termed "the subterranean world of the bomb," then lead him or her step by step through the strategy and institutions of strategic nuclear war.

Sometimes the story puts the emphasis on how the system might go wrong (Wargames, Failsafe); other times on the effects when--it's always when, never if--the balloon goes up (The Day After); and sometimes on how we landed in the nuclear soup (The Atomic Cafe, The Dead-End Kids). The way these works and also comes in three brands: the Ominous Warning ("Time is running out!"), the Barely-Averted Disaster ("Whew, that was a close one!"), or Total Doom ("I told you so!").

INTELLECTUALS--AND THIS category includes all creative types--are naturally predisposed to believe in the power of ideas, particularly their own, so the tendency to overrate their impact is not surprising. And nuclear war is the ideal intellectual stomping ground to let loose pent-up speculative urges. It's a problem of literally earth-shattering import, it's endlessly debatable, and best of all it's completely hypothetical. No one every fought and nuclear war, or even came all that close to fighting one, so experts can only guess and guess again about the issue. And once you've mastered the lingo of kilotonnage and force posture, there is little difference between the nuclear amateur and the nuclear expert. It's a game anyone with a typewriter can play.

But the attraction of the topic does not explain why writers insist on making dramatic molehills out of this political mountain (were George Bernard Shaw alive today, he might have been able to inject some new dramatic tension into the form, but in all likelihood we would have gotten another Back to Methuselah instead of a Major Barbara). What prompts people like Kopit to encroach upon the territory of nuclear arms gurus like Jonathan Schell or Joe Nye, when Kubrick beat them to the atomic punch 24 years ago?

Ego, That's what. Signs of dramatic hubris are all over the place. Kopit realized whose shadow he was working under, and early in his play he dismissed Dr. Strangelove's significance to the present-day nuclear situation. He tries to add some Pirandellian interest to the issue by writing End of the World as a play about writing a play on the arms race--incidentally turning the playwright into a heroic comedian a la Neil Simon. Flailing madly for dramatic interest, Kopit scatters references to detective fiction, academia and Beltway culture that are not nearly so hip as kopit thinks. To call the of his efforts "contrived" would be generous indeed.

Many who have seen this play and similar pieces from the Nuclear Lit genre try to give them points for having a heart in the right place. But as they say on Broadway, the road to hell--and an early closing--is paved with good intentions. Public spiritedness is no excuse for bad drama, particularly at $15.00 a throw. What's worse, a constant barrage of unimaginitive agitprop will eventually run afoul of the law of diminishing returns. Americans are already information saturated, and witless repititions of the same pointless message about nuclear war will induce indifference, not involvement.

WITH THE GREAT Amerika brouhaha exploding over our heads weeks before the show itself begins, the American media will once again don hairshirts and bewail either the excess or absence of the proper political sensitivities in our art forms. Both contentions are nonsense, as politics is almost always irrelevant to the American public's perception of the arts.

While this country may once have been vulnerable to the siren song of political sophistry, today's citizens who bother to think about politics at all are a toughened, cynical lot who can resist such blandishments. The political content of art has always been secondary to its crowd-pleasing appeal; the same audiences who saw Rambo two years ago the Top Gun last year are now flocking to Platoon, simply because they like a good heavy-calibre war flick.

So Kopit and his fellow practitioners of Nuclear Lit better cop this lesson from Hollywood, and either put up good stuff or shut up. Rehashing Kubrick may work for a while--the short memory of the American public and all that--but the thinking, influential audiences, Kopit et. al. are seeking will be the least likely to swallow completely derivative swill.

The next major nuclear piece in the pipeline is the film version of Dead End Kids, the multimedia intellectual vaudeville created by the Mabou Mines theatrical troupe. As realized by director JoAnne Akalaitis, this play tried to place nuclear power and weaponry in the context of Western history, instead of viewing it as some sort of aberration of modern politics. While dated even then by its nuclear freeze sentiments, Dead End Kids still made a good stab at some insight into the atomic age. With any luck, Akalaitis has already seen Kopit's play and is scouring her own work for similar flaws. If not Dead End Kids may end up as another worthy idea melted down by overheated artistic ambition.