New Play in Manhattan

Who Was That Lady I Saw You With? (by Norman Krasna) concerns a Columbia chemistry professor whose wife catches him kissing a girl student and at once starts packing for Reno. A would-be helpful pal of the culprit cooks up the explanation that the kiss was part of the professor's job as an FBI man. This quickly makes matters worse, for though the wife is mollified, the FBI gets wind of the story. Wheels start to turn, wires begin to cross, and the plot not only thickens but broadens and lengthens as well.

For not quite half the evening, the play --though always gagged to the windpipe--has its fair share of laughs. It has them, in a way, because the situation is so insanely silly: knowing he can never make his premise hold water, Playwright Krasna (Dear Ruth, John Loves Mary) gets his fun out of the way it leaks. The laughs come also because Peter Lind Hayes, Mary Healy, and most particularly Ray Walston make a nimble trio as the husband, the wife and the fixer; while Rouben Ter-Arutunian provides a sequence of ingenious sets.

But hilarity, in Who Was That Lady, begins at home, and ends there. Once the FBI gets involved, the fun that is meant to snowball proceeds to melt. The silliness, instead of turning cartwheels, drags a leg; the gags cheapen, the situations crumble. Acute FBItis sets in; then comes that death rattle of farce, when the play is in infinitely worse trouble than the characters. For all its earlier bounciness, Who Was That Lady I Saw You With? eventually seems as long-drawn-out as its title, and pretty nearly as old hat.

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