Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 90

in ing younger lover walked out on her, has driven her to drink. Yet you have the feeling that it has been less a drive than a short walk. She seems a person doomed to escapism in one form or another. The play opens as she returns from a cure, filled with hope for a brighter future. A charming teen-aged daughter by her broken marriage has come to live with her; two close friends, a homosexual actor and a married woman who is still something of a beauty, are there to warm her homecoming.

She even has the strength to eject her exlover when he tries to come back into her life. Then things start to go wrong. The male friend is fired from a show in rehearsal; the female is abruptly faced with a divorce. Miss Stapleton uses these two catastrophes as an excuse to drown her sorrow in drink and suddenly she is back where she started before the cure. As the lady who is trying desperately to hold onto her husband, her looks and her youth, there is Betsy von Furstenberg giving the best performance of her career.

Michael Lombard is excellent too as the deviate actor, who wants so much to protect Miss Stapleton from her addiction, and Ayn Ruymen, making her Broadway debut in the difficult part of the daughter, shows great promise. Charles Siebert scores in the small part of the lover and Alex Colon is briefly effective as a grocery boy. There is, in addition, to the intrusive comedy, a self-pitying attitude among the characters that is mismated with a kind of stiff upper lip or "Life is just a bowl of cherries" manner. This is particularly true in an unconvincing ending that promises some hope which, like too many political speeches, you feel will shortly be shattered. 'Tarot' plays high card By Allan Wallach "We've made a few changes in the order," an addendum to the program of "Tarot" disarmingly informs the audience.

"We've decided not to create the earth (Scene 1) The creation of the earth is one of the few minor feats not attempted in "Tarot," an occult entertainment which premiered last night at the Chelsea Theater Center of Brooklyn in the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The biggest feat still remaining is that the show- conceived by a performer who calls himself the Rubber Duck-is a fusion of at least three popular forms: mime, musical and rock concert. Most of the time, "Tarot" succeeds so beautifully on its own terms that even if you regard occultism as essentially silly stuff, as I do, you are likely to find the show a totally engaging trip through the mysterious, prophetic world of the tarot cards. For me, the major accomplishment is the eclectic and witty score composed by Tom Constanten, who also plays electric piano in the group called (what else?) Rubber Duck's Rubber Band. Constanten's music ranges from hard rock to classical allusion to Indian sitar music, which transforms the group momentarily into a kind of Constanten's raga-time band.

Other members of the Band also composes some of the music. As for the contribution of the Rubber Duck, it almost defies compression. In Part 1, tarot figures like the Thief of Cups, Greed and the Hierophant have their brief moment on the Chelsea's circular stage before crossing over to a great beyond presided over by Eternity and a Mystic Farmer. Others do their different things: The Hermit looks benign, the Black and White Magicians look magical and the Hanged Man hangs. In Part 2, the Fool (played by the Rubber Duck) is born, encounters life in the form of other tarot figures, dies and is reborn as a butterfly.

A lot of this may seem foolish--may even be foolish-but think of it as a good concert with dazzling illustrations or, if you prefer, a good mime show with dazzling music. The young performers in mime's whiteface are talented, even if the mime isn't always of a quality that would drive Marcel Marceau to a voice coach. There are two brief episodes of nudity, one involving a beautiful girl in a diaphanous gown and the other involving the Rubber Duck and another girl in a diaphanous tree. (What? You've never seen a diaphanous tree and a nude Rubber Duck?) At its best, "Tarot" employs some lovely imagery. When the White and Black Magicians vie for the destiny of the Fool, White gives him a bubble ring with which he sends a pure, crystalline bubble sailing over the audience.

A moment later, Black gives him a puff on a joint. The next bubble is smoky and evil, if you can conceive of an evil-looking bubble. The directors, the ubiquitous Rubber Duck and Robert Kalfin, keep most of the action in designer Stephen Hendrickson's colorful gypsy-camp setting at this same level--an ingenuous combination of artifice and simplicity. And at the preview I attended, the Rubber Band stretched the show into a concert before and after the performance, a bonus I'm told that is repeated every night. In a book I consulted on the occult art of tarot, the point is made that a tarot card may prophesy good or bad, depending on the person whose fortune is being told.

So it is with if you go wanting the conventional, you are likely to have a bad evening. If you set out in search of the unusual and imaginative, I prophesy a rewarding trip to Brooklyn. Maureen Stapleton comforts Ayn Ruymen in 'Gingerbread Too many wisecracks By George Oppenheimer Neil Simon, the most expert and successful comedy writer of our day, has written his first dramatic play. It is called "The Gingerbread Lady" and it opened last night at the Plymouth Theater with that lovely actress Maureen Stapleton as its star and a fine cast under the sensitive direction of Robert Moore. It is the story of a woman alcoholic who cannot stay away from the stuff.

And, unhappily, it also is the picture of a playwright SO addicted to comedy that he cannot stay away from it either. Again and again there are brilliantly funny lines and again and again they interrupt the dramatic mood. I almost began to expect a laugh at the end, or even in the middle, of a serious scene and I was seldom surprised when it came. Mr. Simon is too good a writer to be dismissed summarily, no matter what he is writing.

There came a point in the progress of his play when he had doubts about it and withdrew it in order to rewrite. His dissatisfaction is proof of his integrity, but I'm afraid that, in his rewriting, he failed to recognize the basic flaw, namely his failure to face a tragic situation and his attempt to skirt it with too much wisecracking. I was reminded of the ladies of Dorothy Parker's short stories, who hid their tragic faces behind comic masks. These stories, however, attained a poignancy by being no more than brief sketches. Had they been attenuated, as they are here, they would undoubtedly have lost much of their effectiveness.

Miss Stapleton enacts with great skill a woman who has been a singer, slightly reminiscent of an older Judy Garland. An unsuccessful marriage followed by unsuccessful affairs, one in particular in which a scroung- Monday, December 14, 1970 Rubber Duck as Philosopher in 'Tarot': We foresee an engaging trip. 7A.