Autumn's Offerings

Last season the average Broadway show had the life expectancy of a mosquito on the belly of a four-armed Hindu Siva. Critics and public alike slapped plays down as soon as they appeared. But almost in spite of themselves, Broadway producers, having survived, are ready to try again. The fall list is so promising that it may well atone for the recent past.

Some of the higher lights of the fall:

COMEDY: Period of Adjustment involves two young couples during the early period of their marriages, and is, remarkably enough, a comedy by Tennessee Williams (scheduled to open Nov. 10).*

MUSICALS: In an all-out attempt to recreate the box-office wonder of My Fair Lady, T. H. White's Arthurian novel The Once and Future King is being stage' tooled as Camelot. As with Fair Lady, Frederick Loewe is the composer, Alan Jay Lerner the book adapter and lyricist, Moss Hart the director, Julie Andrews one of the stars (Nov. 17). Irma la Douce, still running in Paris (nearly four years) and London (two years), and by far the most successful modern European musical, comes to Broadway still flavored with Parisian argot as it pursues the light, fantastic tale of a Paris poule or tart (Sept. 29). Multitalented Meredith (The Music Man) Willson takes his second shot at Broadway with The Unsinkable Molly Brown--a story of the Titanic disaster and a survivor otherwise known as Tammy Grimes (Nov. 3). Tenderloin, adapted by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman from Samuel Hopkins Adams' novel about the saints and sinners of Manhattan in the 90s, stars Maurice Evans (Oct. 17).

SPECIALTIES: An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May introduces to Broadway one of the best comic teams to come out of U.S. nightclubs (Oct. 8). Laughs and Other Events is a one-man show by My Fair Lady's Cockney Stanley (Get Me to the Church on Time) Holloway, done in the broad British music hall tradition of songs, stories, and dance routines (Oct. 10).

STRAIGHT PLAYS: Broadway is already battening its booby hatches for the arrival from London of The Hostage, not so much because of the nature of the play (a young British soldier is held captive in a Dublin brothel) but because of the playwright, who promises his presence. At a London performance of his show, Author Brendan Behan terrorized the English audience with extempore outbursts, matched booze for boos, refused to heed the actors when they faced him across the footlights and thundered: ''Shut up" (Sept. 20). An adaptation of Novelist John Hersey's The Wall (about Nazi extermination of Polish Jews) stars George C. Scott (Oct. 5). Judy Holliday is an odd but interesting choice as the star of Laurette, adapted from Marguerite Courtney's excellent, unrestrained biography of her mother, the late Actress Laurette Taylor (Oct. 27). Eli Wallach will take over the role Laurence Olivier created in London in Eugene lonesco's symbolic Rhinoceros, a play in which everyone but the hero, the last individual, turns into a horny beast (Dec. 3). Sir Laurence himself arrives in Jean Anouilh's Becket. With one eye on history and another on the forces that motivate it, the French playwright follows England's Henry II and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas a Becket through the murder in the cathedral (Oct. 5).

MYSTERY: The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie's first play on Broadway since Witness for the Prosecution, perpetrates its murder in a snowbound manor. Still on stage in London after neany eight years of continuous performances, it is the longest running play in the history of the English theater (Nov. 5).

* All dates as of last week.

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