Theater: Merry, Merry

Barefoot in the Park, by Neil Simon.

If the theater housing this comedy has , empty seat for the next couple of ears, it will simply mean that someone has fallen out of it. Barefoot is deto-natingly funny.

The odd thing about Broadway's first mash-hit play this season is that it could have been a flop. The plot and one of the sight gags are middle-of-the-rut, but the comedy never bogs down because it keeps taking fresh and fanciful detours. Mike Nichols' direction and Neil Simon's quip hand are faster than the most jaded playgoer's recollective eye.

Corie (Elizabeth Ashley) and Paul (Robert Redford) are newlyweds and their marriage is a six-day wonder. So is their apartment. This five-flight walk-up (six counting the outdoor stoop) in an East 40s Manhattan brownstone is a one-room void with annexes: a postage-stamp bedroom sans bed, a bathroom sans tub, a radiator that has chosen February not to work, and a skylight with a missing pane for snow that wants to come in out of the snow. As a proper young lawyer, Paul has qualms about the place, but he is still inclined to be playful: "I'll come home early and we'll wallpaper each other."

Corie's mama (Mildred Natwick) drops in earlier. So does Victor Velasco (Kurt Kaszner), an average Continental charmer. This sets a zany subplot in motion: Can a lonely New Jersey pill popper who sleeps on a board find enduring happiness with an ebullient Hungarian gourmet who sleeps on a rug? It takes an uproarious culinary trek to Staten Island and several draughts of ouzo, the Greek tequila, to resolve this dilemma. Meanwhile, Corie and Paul have a lallapalouzo of a spat. Corie's mother primes a happy last-act curtain with some classic advice on how to hold a man: "Make him feel important. If you do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage, like two out of every ten couples."

Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford are one couple in ten thousand. Their romantic good looks and deft comic timing give the play a believable illogic in which farce becomes fairy tale. As one of the world's funnier women, Mildred Natwick can verbally give a line the same corkscrewy twist that Margaret Rutherford manages with massive facial quirks. Nowadays, when even the comic muse pulls a long face, a smiling, unalloyed joy awaits those who hotfoot it to Barefoot.