Good Portents

This year the Broadway season opens in California -- at Los Angeles' Ahmanson Theater on Sept. 12. The occasion is the U.S. premiere (and pre-New York run) of Eugene O'Neill's More Stately Mansions, his last discovered work and a sequel to A Touch of the Poet. The star is Ingrid Bergman, making her first U.S. stage appearance since 1946. And even if that combination fails to catch on, Broadway abounds with portents for one of the better seasons in years.

For starters, there is the reappearance of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, a double feature not seen on Broadway in four seasons. Miller returns with The Price, a drama of two brothers battling over ancestral property. Williams is polishing a comedy about the impact of a flood on a family in the Mississippi Delta; his working title is Kingdom of Earth. Meanwhile, the prolific Edward Albee will appear for the fourth straight season with an Americanization of Giles Cooper's Lon don suburban comedy, Everything in the Garden.

Even better for Broadway's tired blood is the infusion of at least six new U.S. playwrights v. last year's one (Woody Allen). Edward Albee's own company, Theater 1968, is producing 39-year-old Actress Mary Mercier's Johnny No-Trump, the growth pains of a New York teenager. Another actor turned author, Stephen Levi, 26, will make his debut with Daphne in Cot tage D, starring William Daniels and Sandy Dennis as the widow of a famous movie star. Other hopefuls of the coming season:

DRAMAS

Two weeks after the O'Neill premiere in California, the first Broadway curtain will rise on Dr. Cook's Garden, an Ira Levin melodrama about medical ethics, with Burl Ives, Screen Actor Keir Dullea (David and Lisa) and George C. Scott as director. From Britain, David Merrick is bringing a sure conversation piece: Playwright Tom Stoppard's existentialist upending of Hamlet, titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Another West End import is the adaptation of Muriel Spark's novel about a slightly bonkers Edinburgh schoolmarm, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The title role, perfected by Vanessa Redgrave, now goes to Australian-born Zoe Caldwell. Arriving more belatedly from Britain is Harold Pinter's 1958 "comedy of menace," The Birthday Party.

A still more talked-about revival is Lillian Hellman's 1939 The Little Foxes, with Mike Nichols directing a company comprising Anne Bancroft, Margaret Leighton, George C. Scott, E. G. Marshall and Geraldine Chaplin. Not least of the season's curiosities: Soviet Playwright Aleksie Arbuzov's The Promise, the first postwar Russian work to play Broadway. Directed by Britain's Frank Hauser, it is a romance about life and love in Leningrad.

COMEDIES

Broadway's safest speculations and half its entries will be comedies. Playwright Neil Simon, whose royalties in 1966 ran to $20,000 a week, will open Plaza Suite, four one-acters that have in common a Plaza Hotel locale, with George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton. Also back are Authors Norman Krasna, (Dear Ruth), Samuel Taylor

(Sabrina Fair) and Herb Gardner (A Thousand Clowns). Krasna's Blue Hour is a Manhattan love fable. Taylor's Avanti details a triangle between an Englishwoman, an American man and the Italian bureaucracy.

Gardner, in The Goodbye People, will be mining Broadway's newest mother lode: the cold war between generations. In Peter Ustinov's Halfway Up the Tree, a parent, Anthony Quayle, hopes to prove himself hipper than the kids. The same goes for Jean Arthur, back onstage at 61, in Richard Chandler's The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake. A household mutiny is also the theme of Keep It in the Family, a London import featuring Maureen O'Sullivan. Another West End hit making the passage: Terence Frisby's There's a Girl in My Soup, concerning a lady-killing culinary expert (Gig Young).

MUSICALS

Most "original" musicals are cribbed from something else these days, but one exception this year is How Now, Dow Jones, a Wall Street flyer by Max Shu!man with tunes by Hollywood's Elmer Bernstein. There will also be slices of several lives: George M., with Cohan's own songs and Joel Grey (Cabaret) in the title role; Dumas and Son, with score based on themes by Saint-Saens; and Fagade, starring Vienna's Marisa Mell as Mata Hari and staged by Vincente Minnelli.

Otherwise, the musicals will be lifted from just about every source but the Moynihan Report. Catch My Soul is a rock version of Othello. Producer Mitch Miller will revisit John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Arnold Bennett's Great Adventure becomes Darling of the Day, with music by Jule Styne. Plays returning in musical incarnation: The Happy Time, with fail-safe Director Gower Champion and Robert Goulet as leading man; and The Madwoman of Chaillot, by the same team (Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence, Composer Jerry Herman) that converted Maine. And now, reversing the old pattern, Broadway is borrowing from Hollywood: onstage, the movie The World of Henry Orient will be known as Henry, Sweet Henry; Don Ameche is playing Peter Sellers.

Broadway does cherish one "original"--George Abbott. At the ripe old age of 80, he is directing an updated Hellzapoppin (1938-41), this time with Soupy Sales and Nancy Walker. Another Abbott entry: a musical version of The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, featuring Tom Bosley (Fiorello!). For Abbott, the shows are the 109th and 110th of his career.

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