Happily Never After

Broadway comedy standards may have deteriorated some since the days of Kaufman and Hart, but they have yet to plummet to the level of Happily Never After, and with luck will be spared the experience.

Of late, Neil Simon's plays--particularly Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple--have become prototypes of the well-constructed comedy. The elements that Simon uses--the faltering young marriage, the faltering old marriage, and the freethinking teenager or postteenager--also find their way into everybody else's comedies. And J.A. Ross's Happily Never After simply can't resist overdoing a trend.

Never After tells of an almost middleaged couple (the husband is a market-analysis man and the wife a Congresswoman) who seek a weekend's rest on Long Island and find instead two days of hysteria. Contributing to the hysteria are the husband's daughter by an earlier marriage, his young market-analysis partner, and the market-analysis partner's wife.

What passes for a comic situation is that the partner and his wife are splitting up over a slightly bizarre sex problem. He gargles only on nights when he is in the mood, and once she hears him gargling she loses interest and falls asleep. What's more, as she announces in a distraught moment, "When I'm in the mood, he hasn't gargled."

Of course an entire play can't be built on only one such gem of an idea. The middleaged couple also has its problems. Like the husband's throwing up whenever he's upset, and the wife's wanting another child. The daughter, who has just returned from years of psychoanalysis and college, jars everybody with her intention to share an apartment with a Columbia medical student.

If the characters seem farfetched types, the actors are familiar ones. As the middleaged husband, Gerald S. O'Loughlin is almost indistinguishable from Alan King, Ken Kercheval, O'Loughlin's partner, looks and talks like Orson Bean. Rochelle Oliver is reminiscent of Sandy Dennis, though quite funny in her own right.

Barbara Barrie was the Cannes Film Festival Best Actress of 1964 for One Potato, Two Potato, and hasn't played much comedy. But she takes to it awfully well. Hers is the only character that is both believable and funny, even if on paper it might be neither.

The rest of the cast writhes under the direction of Alan Arkin, known until now as an actor. Just as Neil Simon provides a model for good comedy writing, Mike Nichols has come to be considered the comedy director to emulate; but Arkin, himself a veteran of the Nichols-directed Luv, fails to match up to the master.

Behind Arkin's less than first-rate direction, however, is a play that isn't really worth staging. The author of Happily Never After, Judith Ann Ross, is also the wife of George W. George, the play's producer. And if such maxims can be evolved on the basis of only one example, vicious circles involving producers and producers' wives should not be entered into carelessly.