Theater: Simple Simon

The Star-Spangled Girl. Eden without Eve is Neil Simon's idea of Paradise. The eternal female drives his characters nuts. In The Odd Couple, a pair of poker-playing middle-agers fled their wives to room together in bachelor bliss. In The Star-Spangled Girl, a pair of post-Ivy League rebels share a dropout of an apartment with penurious satisfaction until a girl who looks like a whipped-cream frappé shows up to curdle their joy.

Anthony Perkins and Richard Benjamin, the boys involved, write and edit a magazine of strenuous anti-U.S. protest but no visible proceeds called Fallout. The boys are intelligent fools and natural allies. Editor Perkins has the wiry agony of a tortured coat hanger. Benjamin, the writing half of the team, casts the glowless beam of an abandoned lighthouse.

The girl who invades their paradise — played by Connie Stevens, an actress with the vocal cords of a Southern noncom — is a superpatriot who treats the American flag like a family heirloom. Nonetheless, her "smell" sends Benjamin into an aphrodizzying spin. Trying feverishly to free his writer from this sexual block, Perkins soon follows his own nose to the selfsame love. On this slender plot line, the playwright has hung some Simon-pure comedy of the inane, the illogical and the absurd. His natively quirky touch is evident when Benjamin attempts to escort the girl bedward with the line, "This is a citizen's arrest." But every so often the gags are too simple Simon.

George Axelrod has directed the cast to act with the fury of lions loosed on early Christians. Yet even when the players flay their roles, enough humor prevails to permit Girl to join Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple and Sweet Charity as another hit, making Neil Simon the first playwright since Avery Hopwood in 1920 to have four Broadway shows running at the same time.