Theater: Beginner's Luck

Sunday in New York, by Norman Krasna. has as its heroine an unhip news-chick who is 22 and given to wondering out loud whether she should give up her virginity. The chick (Pat Stanley) is assured by her air pilot brother (Conrad Janis) that nice girls shouldn't. Her millionaire boy friend walks out on her, contending that she should. Riding a Manhattan Fifth Avenue bus and nursing the blues, she hooks another eligible male (Robert Redford) — hooks him literally, with a barbed dress catch that rips out his breast pocket. They share a snack and a movie and get caught in the rain, that sly love god of synthetic playwrights. At the apartment she shares with her brother, they get out of their wet things and into some loose dialogue. Out go the lights, but he, it seems, has scruples about "beginners." Back come the lights on the semi-robed twosome, in barges the boy friend, marriage-bent, out springs the half-believable alibi that he is Eileen's brother, up pops the real brother.

Actors Stanley and Redford pump fresh air into Krasna's saggy script, especially its laugh-shy first act. But they cannot camouflage the fact that this type of play has long been outgrown by just about everyone whose first love was not a box office.