Theater: Showing Off Miss H.

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No play has more claim to be called an American classic than The Show-Off. This season's second production of the APA Repertory Company (TIME, Dec. 8) opened in 1924, had 674 performances on Broadway, and has suffered countless amateur versions. It was filmed three times (with Gregory Kelly in 1926, Spencer Tracy in 1934, Red Skelton in 1947). And it was written by the grand old man of the U.S. stage, George Kelly, 80, actor, director, and uncle of the Princess of Monaco.

Into the middle-middle-class Fisher family, bickering affectionately in a comfortable old house in North Philadelphia, comes the Show-Off, one Aubrey Piper, a $32.50-a-week clerk in the Pennsylvania Railroad freight office. A back-slapping braggart with the laugh of a hyena and the implacable euphoria of a lobotomy patient, Aubrey woos and wins the Fishers' younger daughter Amy over the vociferous outrage of the rest of the family. Aubrey does everything wrong—lying with grandiloquent transparency, big-spending his way into debt—and as a husband seems to justify every dire prediction of the fuming Mrs. Fisher. Of course, there turns out to be some good in him after all.

Clayton Corzatte plays Aubrey with a bravura that grates audience sensibilities in the beginning but still manages to modulate into something like sympathy by the end. But the play belongs to Mrs. Fisher—the best role Helen Hayes has found since she was Queen Victoria 29 years ago.

Mrs. Fisher is a talky, bustling, busybody mom who tries to be everywhere at once—rushing to the kitchen, shouting into the cellar, hooting up the stairs —while carping and cajoling her family into line. Helen Hayes stretches her blue eyes in amazement, pursues her mobile mouth with concern and squeaks her voice for emphasis without ever allowing the back of the theater to miss a syllable of her sublimely inconsequential comic lines.

After 43 years, The Show-Off is still a surprisingly good play, albeit a psychologically dated one; today's audience must suspend its natural inclination to see Aubrey Piper as a sick man rather than merely an irritating dreamer. But Miss Hayes bounces things along with such verve and charm that Dr. Freud is not likely to be missed.