Divorce in Sportive High Style

By T.E. Kalem

THE NEW YORK IDEA by LANGDON MITCHELL

This comedy was written by a Harvard-educated lawyer and first presented in 1906. The play is surprisingly un-spavined by age. It is the genre to which it belongs that has disappeared. Social comedy based on the code of an assured upper class has withered away with the democratization of that class and the loss of its role as the arbiter of manners.

The last substantial U.S. playwright in this mode was Philip Barry, whose The Philadelphia Story is brought to mind by The New York Idea. Essentially, the New York idea is divorce and^ the notion that divorced couples can be amiable friends and chase after their respective ex-spouses. These propositions were as scandalous in 1906 as they are commonplace today. But the play lives because its humor has the pinpoint carbonation of champagne and a tipsily endearing bias toward romance.

The gay divorcees are the lovely Cynthia Karslake (Blythe Danner), a sportive Cressida of the drawing room and the racing paddock, and Vida Phillimore (Rosemary Harris), a playful past mistress of the chaise longue. Cynthia has become engaged to the divorced Mr. Phillimore (Stephen Collins), a man as stiff as the judicial bench over which he presides. Vida is on the prowl for the charm-charged divorced Mr. Karslake

(Rene Auberjonois). A debonair English visitor (Denholm Elliott), who is a lively connoisseur of filly flesh, helps the comedy peak to Feydeau-like farce.

While the entire Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) troupe should be laved in a shower of praise, the master builder of this exercise in high style rates top honors. British Director Frank Dunlop (Sherlock Holmes, Scapino) has assembled in the borough of Brooklyn the kind of radiant acting company that Robert Morley promises to U.S. tourists who fly to London. This is the nucleus of an American counterpart to the Royal Shakespeare Company or the British National Theater. Let us pray for its robust survival. T.E. Kalem

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