Carol Looks Back, Again

It's one thing to host a TV special filled with outtakes from your old CBS comedy series and knock 'em dead in the ratings. It's quite another to try a new career as a playwright. But that's what Carol Burnett has done. She and daughter Carrie Hamilton (who died of lung cancer in January) collaborated on Hollywood Arms, a play based on Burnett's memoir, One More Time. Hamilton worked nearly till the end; she was viewing actors' audition tapes until just weeks before her death. But Mom had to finish alone. The play opened in Chicago last week to mixed reviews. To be sure, the string of incidents--young Carol (here called Helen) lives in a one-room Hollywood apartment with her cranky Christian Scientist grandmother (Linda Lavin) and her alcoholic, divorced mother--is overlong and shapeless. But the play's very artlessness makes it more affecting than many slicker stage memoirs. Its portrayal of how a dysfunctional upbringing can look absolutely normal to the child caught up in it rings true. --By Richard Zoglin