Birth of a Season

Generation, by William Goodhart. A baby is born in this comedy, and a stillborn Broadway theater season comes to life with it. This is not a hard-sell gag show but a play imbued with a fond and wry regard for the humor implicit in human nature. With an honest eye, Playwright Goodhart also observes what is often called the conflict but is really the distance between generations.

Jim Bolton (Henry Fonda) is a Chicago advertising man who believes that he is "very close" to his daughter, but when he flies to New York to meet an unknown son-in-law acquired within the week, it is quickly apparent that he has been out of touch for at least nine months. His daughter (Holly Turner) is quite obviously about to make him an instant grandfather.

The newlyweds are living in a Greenwich Village loft that looks as if its only previous occupant had been a huge wedge of pie. The bridegroom (Richard Jordan) is the sort of lad who is so taken with the way the light falls on his wife's blue-beaded necklace that he is wearing it. Furthermore, the boy seems to have an excellent chance of remaining in the no-income bracket, his only known assets being far-out light verse, arty photography, folk singing and whacking together his own furniture. Though Fonda's mind and face boggle in a perfect weather map of cloudy consternation, he makes a liberal-minded effort to adjust to all this. His period of adjustment conies to a desperate halt when he learns that the son-in-law intends to deliver the forthcoming baby himself in a self-carpentered obstetrical room.

Fonda makes frantic efforts to ring in a company lawyer, a doctor and a hyperthyroid magazine editor (Sandy Baron) to thwart the ultranatural-childbirth plot. This keeps the stage busy, but what keeps the play moving is undrying freshets of laughter, the limber comic pacing of Director Gene Saks, and the abrasive tension of the generational tug-of-war. The son-in-law's nose is keener than his intelligence. He scents corruption in every institution, but he demands a kind of impossible social purity, something akin to repealing the Industrial Revolution. The father has permitted an urgent sense of familial responsibility to blur his ethics on expense accounts and income taxes, but he also recognizes that no one can paddle a family canoe in the idyllic recesses of Walden Pond.

The magnetic self-contained drama of birth excites everyone, partly because it is man's eternal second chance. Paradoxically, it seems to affirm what it is destined to refute, as one generation's wisdom inevitably becomes the next generation's folly. Without being overly profound or unduly grave, William Goodhart has planted this insight in the spine of his first play. In a rock-solid performance, Henry Fonda not only gives body to a role, but also substance to a man.

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