CLOSED.(The Talk of the Town)(Bobbi Boland closes)

Life on Broadway is exceedingly rough. Casts change overnight; directors get fired, critics attack, and plays close. But what is rare--it has happened only four times since 1980--is to see a play shut down before opening night. In the case of "Bobbi Boland," which starred Farrah Fawcett, the closing came with particular abruptness--after a mere seven preview performances. The producer, Joyce Johnson, has said that the play "simply does not work in a Broadway house."

Fawcett has tried to be staunch, but it is clear that the early death of "Bobbi Boland" is a torment. "It just happened so suddenly," she said late last week. "Maybe it wouldn't have been a smash, but I know it wouldn't have been the worst play ever, as some people have said."

It has been a stressful time. She recalled one preview when the curtain was nearly thirty minutes late and the audience had become a little raucous in its clapping. Backstage, she didn't have her makeup person. "I didn't even see the wigs until the first preview," she said. "And there were times when I had thirty-eight seconds to take a wig off, take the skullcap off, take the pins out, change the dress, take off the jewelry, put the nightgown on, wet my hair, and the lady didn't have the spray bottle open." Another night, she went on, "I said to Joyce, 'Is this a play about wigs, or is this a play that we want to have good performances in?' "

Since the nineteen-seventies, when Fawcett, who is fifty-six, found her place in ...