THEATER: EVER AFTER

IN 1928, WITH THE STOCK MARKET ballooning to new highs and the Depression a year off, Philip Barry's drawing-room comedy Holiday opened on Broadway. It returned last week while the market was again in the clouds. Since the play is all about riches--about the enticements and confinements money imposes on the young--its return looks opportune. Between its first appearance and the latest, however, something seemingly bigger than a Depression (or a world war or a revolution in social mores) has arisen to obstruct its revival: a movie. In 1938 George Cukor directed Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the leads, and they placed their stamp on the roles--indelibly.

Onstage, under David Warren's direction, Laura Linney takes the Hepburn part of Linda Seton, of the megamoneyed Fifth Avenue Setons. Linda is a would-be free spirit who falls for her straitlaced sister's fiance, a poor-born but quick-climbing lawyer. Though Linney has brightness and passion, Hepburn's telltale intonations--everything from her offhand pluckiness to her tremulous indignation--keep surfacing. As the fiance, Tony Goldwyn has better luck sliding out from under Grant's broad-shouldered shadow, although he escapes partly through lack of intensity; he doesn't fully engage us in his struggle between the two sisters, between prestige and fulfillment.

Like so many of the plays of its era, Holiday today seems an unsettled mixture of the proudly naughty and the primly didactic; when the women aren't smoking, they're apt to be decrying various social ills. This new production likewise straddles two worlds: the here and now, a place in which uncommitted young people marvel uneasily as their elders assemble astonishing fortunes; and the there and then, a zone where Cary and Kate banter toward a luminous happy-ever-after.