Love Apples

By T.E. Kalem

ROMANTIC COMEDY by Bernard Slade

Phoebe Craddock (Mia Farrow) first meets Jason Carmichael (Anthony Perkins) on his wedding day. He happens to be nude, and the rest of this comedy at Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theater is bare in other ways.

Phoebe is a Vermont schoolmarm. Jason is a renowned Broadway playwright. He takes Phoebe on as a working partner, and the pair embark on a platonic but curiously possessive relationship.

Romantic Comedy is one long credibility gap. As comedy it is flush with flip badinage but unilluminated by genuine humor. As romance it is a verbal sparring match with mighty few emo tional clinches. There is no discernible chemical affinity between these two antiseptic people.

Part of the trouble is in the writing and part in the playing. For a boy-meets-girl play to exercise its potential magic, there must be beguiling charm and a contagious affection. Farrow and Perkins project neither. Farrow's Phoebe is naive without the endearing thread of home spun innocence. Her vocal habit of putting equal stress on each syllable, word and sentence leads to aural torpor. Perkins' Jason is waspish and petulant with out a trace of roguish lovability.

One ends up caring only for the peripheral characters. Jason's wife (Holly Palance) seems to defrost a room when she enters it-- in this case, Douglas W. Schmidt's handsomely designed town-house study. Phoebe's husband (Greg Mullavey) is decent, amusing and sweet. But who admires a frame without a picture?

&151;T.E. Kalem

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