Calendar of Love

The theater lights dim. The audience hushes. It is that tingling, anticipatory moment before the curtain rises. Suddenly, bouzouki music shreds the air, and in orchestra seat D-113 Jean Kerr says with a trace of apprehension: "Sounds like we are back at Zorbd." The fear proves groundless. True, the initial setting is Greece, but the play, Forty Carats, is a frothy French farce from Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, the team that wrote Cactus Flower. It is a comedy of new marital modes and manners, precisely the sort of show that people always say they want to see in order to forget the trials and tribulations of the day.

There sits Julie Harris, trig though middleaged, lovely though unhappy. She needs transportation. There stands young Marco St. John, tall, dark, handsome and ever so resourceful. He has a motorcycle to share with the lady. As added enticements, he also offers Julie a bottle of ouzo (which is stronger than gin and sweeter than licorice) and a refreshing nocturnal skinny dip in the wine-dark Aegean. What is a twice-divorced damsel of 40 to do? She accepts, naturally.

Back in Manhattan, complications ensue. One night of love has inflamed this 22-year-old lad, who becomes the ardent wooer of the half-smitten, half-reluctant Julie. Julie's jovially addled mother. Glenda Farrell, thinks the boy is hanging around in order to court Julie's flaming mod daughter Gretchen Corbett, who is almost 18 and as old as Eve. From here on, as in all French farces, the doors take over: who comes through which door when triggers the laughs.

Civilized Fun. One man who comes through the door is a wealthy widower of 45 who seems a highly appropriate match for Julie, but falls head over checkbook in love with Julie's pregnant daughter. Sighs Julie: "Now she'll never graduate from Dalton"--a New York joke about a Manhattan private school, the kind of local allusion with which the show is peppered. To complete the May-October calendar of love, Julie says "I do" to guess who.

The French, of course, have a long tradition of an older woman initiating a young man in the felicities of sex. Transferred to a U.S. setting, Forty Carats acquires a sociological tinge. The play enters a sane and plausible plea for a single standard of judgment on age disparity in marriage. If it is acceptable for an older man to marry a young girl, then it ought to be equally acceptable for an older woman to marry a young man. Love is a game for all seasons.

The adaptation from the French script by Jay Allen might have been wittier, but it is never less than civilized fun, and Abe Burrows has directed the show with crisp agility. As a tonic for middle-aged matrons, Forty Carats is so potent that canny David Merrick may have to institute extra matinees to handle the crush.

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