Sandy Is Dandy

Any Wednesday has Sandy Dennis.

No other play can make a statement half so adorable.

According to the program, Sandy plays Ellen Gordon, the mistress of Tycoon John Cleves (Don Porter). For Internal Revenue purposes, she is a tax dodge. His corporate tax returns list no executive sweetie, only the executive suite that she occupies rent-free on Manhattan's upper East Side. For her tycoon, Sandy is the marriage dodge, the once-weekly moonlighting that leaves John wan each Thursday.

No wonder. After one look at Sandy, illicit designs dissolve in a scrubbed glow of innocence; an evening with her would leave anyone limp--with laughter. She purports to be 30 in the play, but has trouble looking one-third that ancient.

Wednesday's woman is really Wednesday's child. She is a kept waif, chug-a-lugging champagne from the bottle like Coke, sticking out her tongue as if hunting a refractory driblet of ice cream.

Crying through her smiles like a tot who has been told to be brave, but isn't, or speaking in a voice that is forever on the verge of breaking, she sounds like the little girl Santa overlooked.

Of course, she has toys galore: the apartment, its color-blinding furnishings, a closet stuffed with real balloons.

But Mistress Ellen is herself a toy, and she is faced, moreover, with the transformation problem endemic in all U.S. sex farce: how to ascend from playmate to helpmate in two acts and four scenes of deepening innuendo.

The actual situations in Any Wednesday are neither wicked nor sexy, just amusingly compromising. A neophyte secretary, innocently directing proper strangers to the improper address, sends around Cass Henderson (Gene Hackman), an irately appealing small businessman who has come to town to beard John Cleves. When Mrs. John Cleves drops in, Cass poses obligingly as Ellen's husband. When John barges in, all four characters fall sudden prey to lockjaw or dropjaw. Then the comedy slacks into matchmaking.

In her first foray at playwriting, Novelist Muriel Resnik sprinkles spice and sentiment with a light hand and adds a fair dollop of wit. The confection is well served by an able cast, the perfection by Sandy Dennis. Liquor may be quicker, as Ogden Nash once argued, but Sandy is dandy.

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