["Operation Sidewinder"] is clearly an interesting and for all its apparent naïveté a possibly significant play.

I cannot say that at first sight I understood it, but this may be as much my fault as Mr. Shepard's, even though at the moment I arrogantly doubt it. Mr. Shepard has written a phantasmagoric satire about the end of the world—or at least about the end of American materialism.

Mr. Shepard divides people into those of the snake and those of the lizard. Snake people are of the spirit and lizard people are of the earth. And the lizard people win the final confrontation with an explosion to end all explosions….

There are many contrasts here. The contrast between the natural, the snake civilization, of the American Indian, and the lizardly bureaucratic life-style of the white man who has replaced him. There is the contrast between the anxious...