Fun at New Hope

The play was nearly two years old. Including picture rights, it had earned around $750,000. Nevertheless, ticket scalpers were asking and getting $10 a head for opening-night seats, and the house was sold out for the whole run.

This answer to an advance man's prayer happened last week at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pa. Reason for it was the appearance (for ten performances) of Authors George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, aided and sabotaged by tongue-tied Harpo Marx, in their Broadway hit play, The Man Who Came to Dinner.

Actor Kaufman, complete with spectacles, a wispy beard and a wicked musache, bore down on the part of Sheridan Whiteside, the famed lecturer who goes to a dull dinner party in an Ohio town, gets hurt, and has to stay on in the house for weeks. Looking unaccountably Machiavellian, not at all like Alexander Woollcott, about whom the part was written, Playwright Kaufman was quite professional. So was high-domed Actor Hart, who, as Beverly Carlton, a caricature of Noel Coward, looked like any U.S. traveling salesman.

Asked why he had wanted to play The Man, Kaufman, who is a stockholder of the Playhouse and a resident of New Yorkerized Bucks County, said: "Pure exhibitionism. I'm just making a spectacle of myself."

What most people who went to the

Bucks County Playhouse really waited for was to hear mute Harpo speak and play himself (Banjo). In the third act they were rewarded by the bandersnatch entrance of Harpo, minus his red fright-wig but plus a violent shirt with enormous purple and red flowers. Wildly ogling the indulgent audience, he plucked all the Harpo strings, blew bubble gum, enjoyed himself no end. Last time he had spoken out loud on the stage was 25 years ago in a Texas tank town. The long silence had not improved his manners. Said he, stealing a line from the play's catty hero: "I may vomit."

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