Best of Breed

Enter Laughing, by Joseph Stein. Jewish family situation comedies come to Broadway more often than the swallows go back to Capistrano. Separating the dramatic merits and demerits of a Seidman and Son from a Dear Me, the Sky Is Falling is a lot like fingerprinting a Siamese twin. If Enter Laughing is a tiny cut above the breed, it is because Playwright Stein, who adapted his comedy from the autobiographical novel of TV Comedian Carl Reiner, retains stubborn, slightly awkward traces of honest observation. He knows that the immigrant family walks on American soil hopefully, but always with the small secret fear that it is treading quicksand. A name change may spell assimilative success, but Stein recognizes that it also contains a rueful hint of cultural extinction. This is not to suggest that Enter Laughing is a social document, but merely that its solid sense of social place and time (the Depression) gives an evening of frequently paralyzing laughter an element of true comic bite.

Enter Laughing's late-teen-age hero (Alan Arkin) wants to be an actor, an exotic ambition that sends flutters of horror through the hearts of Papa (Marty Greene) and Mama (Sylvia Sidney), who want him to be a druggist. His perils and pratfalls as he develops his dubious talents in a flea-bitten acting school run by a haughty, boozed-up impresario (Alan Mowbray) and his daughter (Vivian Elaine) make for broad, boisterous fun. With his syrupy delivery, chipmunk facial grimaces and gift for lighting his own finger instead of the leading lady's cigarette. Arkin is a clownish glossary of theatrical ineptitude. Making his debut, he catapults onstage and swallows his voice whole, but, as his parents rightly say, "he's the best one." Thanks to Alan Arkin, a playgoer can Enter Laughing and exit roaring.

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