New Play on Broadway

Send Me No Flowers (by Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore) is one more of those popular comedies that hang a lot of baby jests around a papa joke, and that drive a rachitic bit of plot literally to the graveyard. David Wayne is a fervent hypochondriac who, listening in on his doctor's phone call about a doomed patient, concludes it is he who is doomed and makes wheelchair preparations for dying, death and burial. When this misunderstanding is cleared up, a new misunderstanding is quickly brewed: now Nancy Olson, Wayne's pretty wife, decides that all the wheelchair stuff was just a gimmick to cover up a love affair.

Doubtless a touch of hypochondria makes the whole world kin and guarantees moments of sympathetic laughter. But when hypochondria shifts to fancied heart disease, it is easier to be farcical than funny and the baby jokes get more and more unruly as the papa joke lies feebly wasting away. When at last sex gains admittance, the show takes on more life and produces some funny moments. But moments only; Send Me No Flowers, as a whole, is geared too low, pushed too hard and stretched too far.

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