Life Begins at 60

Never Too Late, by Sumner Arthur Long. There's a Ford in many a playgoer's future--Paul Ford. Ford looks rather like an elephant that has had its trunk bobbed.

He may lack the dignity of the great beast, but he shares all of its innate mournfulness. His flappy ears droop dispiritedly. His baleful eyes are broody with hurt. His massive brow (receding hair) puckers with pain. He is the most excruciatingly funny anatomy of melancholy on Broadway. His wife has just told him that in advanced middle age, he is about to enter second fatherhood. Ford trumpets his dismay: "When he gets out of college, I'll be going on 83--if he's smart." Never Too Late is a one-gag all-night laugh show. That it can be unflaggingly sustained is a marvel. Much is owed to a genius of slapstick farce, Director George Abbott. Abbott has willing and extremely winning helpers. As Ford's wife, constant listener, chief cook and sole housekeeper, Maureen O'Sullivan pedals from chore to chore on an imaginary bicycle. As a kind of fledgling adult who married the boss's daughter, works for the boss's lumber company and lives in the boss's house, Orson Bean runs Ford a close second in the evening's whoopstakes. Bean moves as if he were being ejected from a toaster, and his voice box is some sort of faulty dishwasher. He and Ford pair off with the unpredictable felicity of vodka and to mato juice, and in Act III they tie on a mutual bender that makes that overdone theatrical filler, the drunk scene, seem like a creative inspiration in mischief.

The unstrung hero of the piece is 41-year-old Playwright Arthur Sumner Long, whose Broadway debut has left him slightly shell-shocked from the force of a direct hit. As unassuming as his play, Long, a father of two, admits he was even less prepared for a flop: "I wouldn't have dared to go home to Los Angeles. The children--they give you such a sendoff--you hate to sneak back tarred and feathered." A longtime TV writer, Long joshes about his labor pains with Never Too Late: "Eight weeks to write, six years to retype." He got the idea for the play watching "a pretty, grey-haired woman walking down Wilshire Boulevard. She had the only happy face in sight, and was obviously pregnant. I wondered what happened when she first told her husband, what happened when her marriageable children heard of it." What happens in Never Too Late is that Maureen O'Sullivan has the only happy face on stage. But even Paul Ford cannot finally resist the magnetic attraction of new life. At play's end, he begins toying with names for a son (his own is Harry Lambert) : "John, John Lambert.

That sounds good. It needs something else, though." Breaking into a cherubic glow, he intones : "John Fitzgerald Lambert. Republican President of the United States." A born worrier, he glances abruptly toward his wife. "You don't think being a Protestant will hurt his chances, do you?"

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