Theater: Soap Bubble

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Take Her, She's Mine (by Phoebe and Henry Ephron) raises its curtain at 8:40 p.m., but it is really a late late show. The Ephrons are on furlough from screenwriting, but their script is cut from Hollywood family situation comedy and spliced to Hollywood campus frolic.

No one will suffer brain fag identifying the Michaelson family. There is Daddy (Art Carney), a Blunt Ox with a heart as big as his wallet ("I got in plastics early"). There is Mom (Phyllis Thaxter), a sugar-coated Sphinx full of smiling inner wisdom. There is Daughter Mollie (Elizabeth Ashley), a cute little Bunny hopping from her West Coast home to an Eastern college, and into the sights of the great white hunters from Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

At college Mollie embraces boys, Shakespeare ("fabulous"), an avant-garde poetry instructor, folk singing, atomic protest ("Free Bertrand Russell!"). She comes home on vacation a cool sophisti-cat, all burnished claws and no filial purr, and asks what kind of gin Daddy uses in his martinis. As Dad turns the color of vermouth, Mom remarks sagely that Mollie will "never again be as old as she is right now."

Why all this is amiable in its vaporous way is best explained in two words: Art Carney. Carney is a master of comic body English: when he stumbles over a table in the flickering, candlelit murk of a coffeehouse and barks at the bohemian proprietor like a wounded seal, "Are you OPEN?", he is inexpressibly funny. As lovable as Carney's philistine brute is Elizabeth Ashley's collegiate beauty, perfumed with dew-behind-the-ears charm. Between them, these two duck a good many of the script's incessantly bursting soap bubbles.