Pay TV at the Colonial

SITUATION COMEDY is the most banal of American art forms, and unfortunately one of the more popular. Why is anyone interested in Donna Reed's dinner parties or Archie Bunker's poker games? Perhaps because the genre exploits all the most offensive conventions about American families--men are henpecked and boorish, women are hysterical--and viewers get a chance to laugh at their spouses behind their backs.

Even if that's your idea of a fun evening, why travel downtown and pay ten dollars when you can see the same thing in your living room for free? No Hard Feelings, rich with a cast of television veterans, reproduces most of the fatuousness of the 7:30 p.m. time slot, occasionally throwing in a few good jokes about pregnant women, inter-racial love affairs, and poorly pressed suits.

Eddie Albert and Nanette Fabray play an unhappy couple whose marriage has gone on the rocks because of Albert's callousness. Albert's repertory includes a vast array of demeaning character traits. He blames all his faults on his wife and his mother; the cost of the dessert at his daughter's wedding is more important to him than her marriage itself; and he cares more about his stomach and his clothes than about his wife. After Fabray leaves him he spreads his arms in despair and grimaces with suburban uncertainty (about forty times) wondering why she would rather live with a kindly Greek waiter on the upper West Side than share the fruits of his success in the wholesale lighting fixture business.

Most of the play's jokes derive from Albert's inability to understand why affection is more important than money. "What good is one rose from that waiter?" he asks. "I give her a whole garden." In a set reminiscent of upper middle class bedrooms in every divorce comedy of the last five years, Albert lies on his back pondering such questions through much of the first act.

His adulterous spouse, Fabray, talks incessantly, but all the audience ever knows about her is that she left her husband. Her lines are most evocative of an elongated sigh of unspecified meaning.

HER GREEK LOVER Jimmy Skouras, played by Conrad Janis, is the only character who seems like a real person. He is amiable and sentimental and would probably make a very good waiter. Within the barrenness of the acting around him, he somehow manages to exude love for Fabray. But, her inabilities prevent much semblance of affectionate interaction between the two.

Two standard characters provide refreshing excitement in this comedy doldrum. A. Larry Haines plays the Jewish business partner who squirms up to Albert suggesting that he sell him his half of the business and turn to "harlots" for solace. He cringes away when Albert barks back his objections. Stockard Channing is the neurotic and pushy daughter who returns in the middle of her honeymoon to try to patch up her parents' marriage. She is funny mostly because she is a totally unappealing character. She scowls when she is thinking, and thrusts her chin in the air with a little shimmy when she talks.

With these stereotypes well established, the script unfolds with all the flair of an interior decorator's imitation of House Beautiful. Albert first tries to ship Skouras off to Chicago with a bribe of fifteen thousand dollars. When this fails he magnanimously offers to take back his wife after her two week, "maybe three week," little jaunt of a romance. The play reaches a climax of insipidity when Fabray, nine months pregnant by her lover, and Channing, nine months pregnant by her husband, punctuate a conversation about men and childbirth with the long groans of labor pains. In the middle of this scene Albert runs in holding a shot gun, and we learn that he has taken to violence and shot Skouras in the foot.

The bad material is doubly disappointing because Albert and Fabray, both professionals of considerable experience, seem fully aware that the Boston run is only a preview before the real opening in New York in April. They put little effort into their performances. A paying audience deserves more from professionals anywhere.

It's saddening that American theater can produce such an unimaginative and humorless foray into the legitimate subject of marital problems. Everything in No Hard Feelings has been done better by Mike Nichols or Neil Simon, and the producers no doubt hope to recreate their commercial successes. Unfortunately, audiences with real troubles of their own pay to watch such dribble.