New Play in Manhattan

I Know My Love (adapted from the French of Marcel Achard by S.N. Behrman; produced by the Theatre Guild & John C. Wilson) may run for years with the Lunts in it; without them, it would hardly last a week. Not since the perfection of the chocolate-covered peppermint has anything so thin also been so gooey. But with that delightful absorption in themselves that renders them oblivious to their surroundings, the Lunts are as arch, as expert and as enjoyable here as elsewhere.

They are first shown as a Boston Brahmin couple giving a family party on their golden wedding day. Though pretty messy for the family, things are golden for the Lunts. Then the play wanders sentimentally back across the years, offering an assortment of period costumes, family tragedies, marital crises and extramarital complications. Alfred, for whom every age proves a dangerous age, is incurably romantic and roving. Lynn, facing one ticklish domestic situation after another, knows the wise wife's formula for holding her husband: never a cross word and always a puzzle.

Given half a chance, the pair of them, with their timing, their teamwork, their contrapuntal growls and purrs, can put any scene across. And now & then, amid large blobs of stage custard, Playwright Behrman obliges with a nice witticism about husbands or Boston. But unhappily there are long stretches in I Know, My Love when there is neither any play on the stage nor any Lunts.

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