The Theatregoer Married Alive At Adams House through November 9

"HARPO," the Harvard Producing Organization, gave its first show last night. It is a collection of one act farces on married life, wedded together as Married Alice. All three are superbly done.

"Harpo" is the child of Lawrence Senelick and his frustrations with the Loeb Drama Center. Fed up with what he considers the Loeb's non-theatrical organization, he organized "Harpo" as an ensemble theatre company independent of just about everyone except its audience. If the group is successful, Senclick hopes to run a repertory schedule this summer. and continue through the next year in a permanent theatre.

For his first production, Senclick has chosen George Bernard Shaw's Overruled Georges Feydean's Madame's Latte Lamented Mother. and Chekhov's The Wedding. Each takes a part of the chaos of a man and woman living together, and satirizes it with a turn of century sense of opulent depression.

Overruled is Slaw as his most irrelevant. The mood of the play, and even bits of its plot, is very close to Wilde's Importance of Being, Earnest. Two married couples have gone on trips around the world, but each pair has split itself up and started from opposite directions. The husband from each pair has met and tried to seduce the wife of the other, and they have all wound up in the same hotel in England at the end of their trips. That sounds implausible, but then farce is built on implausibility.

The acting is very very British and very good John Pum conveys the right sense of disaster with long speeches which try to "sort out what's happening" and are logically and grammatically correct, if wholly incomprehensible. The other three-Marilyn Pitzele, Sally Fisher, and Senclick-also do beautifully with rather difficult dialogue. Senelick and Miss Fisher are so Victorian they are a little bit scary.

The other two plays seem to be less well written than Overruled. but they are both just as well acted. Both are new translations by Senelick (who appears to be hopelessly multi-talented-and are "modern" in the same way that Dudley Fitts translations of Aristophanes are modern (And I was always a little bit repulsed by hearing a character in The Birds saying. "Gadzooks," but that could just be my hangup.) In any event, Senclick has translated both so that they come out a little like satires on contemporary Jewish marriage.

Madame's late Lamented Mother is about a squabbling couple who believe mistakenly that the wife's mother has died. The husband, played by Lloyd Schwartz, is hilarious as he rips off a string of consoling euphemisms and "There There's" about poor dear sweet mama "passing on ." The play stiffened a little bit from being slapstick and almost too fast to handle intelligently-but everybody laughed a lot so who cares?

The last play, The Heeding. is Checkbox's burlesque of the marriage ceremony. Everyone gets drunk and throws around food. Anything at all sensible is shouted down by the guests, and the play comes close to pathos at the end. A "general" who nobody knows has been brought to the party because the bride "always wanted a general." The "general" is just an old retired navy man who starts screaming orders and blowing his whistle. The guests finally shut him up and hustle him out, and he goes off muttering "A shoddy way to treat an old man." Chekhov's comments on the wedding are naturally depressing as hell; the bride does nothing but cat through the entire play.