Theater: Falling Short RUMORS

After analyzing himself via not just one memory play but a trilogy -- Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound -- Neil Simon said he wanted to write a play without depth or aspiration, one that was simply funny. So he has turned to old-fashioned, door-slamming, crockery-smashing farce. Given that his third marriage broke up as he was writing, it is not surprising that Rumors, which opened on Broadway last week, concerns the vulnerability of the marital relationship to gossipmongering by friends ready to believe the worst.

Any Simon work is eagerly anticipated: Rumors has a box-office advance of more than $2 million. Although preview audiences cheered, in truth the play falls far short of its promise. The plot, which could only have been concocted by a media-shy celebrity, unfolds at a party where the host, a deputy mayor of New York City, lies bleeding from a bullet wound in the earlobe. He is too dazed to talk. His wife and servants are missing. Rather than call for help, the assembled friends launch a cover-up, avoiding scandal ostensibly for their host but also for themselves. Instead of hewing to the consistent if mad logic of successful farce, the conspirators lurch haphazardly from rationale to rationale.

Ron Leibman and Jessica Walter are funny as a crass accountant and his smug wife. Ken Howard and Lisa Banes have striking moments as a would-be state senator and his disenchanted spouse. But the other couples -- Andre Gregory and Joyce Van Patten as a spaced-out therapist and his oddball wife, and Mark Nelson and Christine Baranski as neurotic lawyers -- derive from TV rather than life. Gene Saks, who won two Tony Awards directing the trilogy, finds few nuances here. W.A.H. III