Blue Chip's Descent

By T. E. Kalem

HOLIDAY by PHILIP BARRY

Philip Barry's Holiday first appeared on Broadway in pre-Crash 1928. In scale, it is almost more of a ballroom-and-mansion comedy than a drawing-room comedy. Its characters, the big rich, are either smug, drunk or edgy, and terribly status-conscious. But the real locale of the play, its temperamental North, East, West and South, is the terrain of Coward, Porter, Fitzgerald and Bernard Shaw.

Unfortunately, as the current revival by Manhattan's Phoenix Repertory Company shows, Barry was not quite up to the company he tried to keep. He lacked Coward's dry crystal tone, Porter's slyly sexy urban ennui, Fitzgerald's tender romantic imagination and Shaw's intellect. Barry's plays are a little like cocktail parties that have begun to wind down, leaving the guests more prone to hysteria than hilarity.

Holiday's 30-year-old hero, Johnny Case (John Glover), has made a killing in the stock market and wants to take off for the south of France or the South Seas. He yearns to sit under a tree and find himself. His starchy fiancee, Julia Seton (Robin Pearson Rose), and her even starchier father want Johnny to stay in the marts of finance and be a golden grind. But Johnny's dream of freedom excites Julia's older sister Linda (Charlotte Moore), herself a stifled and smoldering maverick. At play's end, she and Johnny flee together.

Unlike tragedy, which unites people of vastly different eras, comedy has a pesky devotion to the calendar. It is rigid as to time present and is extremely vulnerable to time future. What has befallen Holiday is not so much a fail ure of craft as a passage of time in which substantial historical and social changes have occurred.

In a sense, an entire generation of the U.S. young took Johnny Case's "holiday" in the '60s. In some instances, the results ranged from social anarchy to the destruction of the very self so clamorously being sought. To anyone who sup ports such an analysis, the play has a rueful undertone. Like some of the high flying securities of its day, Holiday, once hailed as a dramatic blue chip, seems to have plummeted to the lowly "cats and dogs" category.

T. E. Kalem

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