SHADOW PLAYS.('Hollywood Arms')(Theater Review)

"Hollywood Arms" (directed by Harold Prince, at the Cort Theatre) is also the name of the cheap and cheerful residential hotel in Los Angeles where Carol Burnett, who wrote the autobiographical play with her late daughter, Carrie Hamilton, grew up in the early nineteen-forties. Even before the lights go down, the curtain calls our attention to the geography of the place--a silk screen shows the iconic hillside whose fifty-foot letters used to spell out the word "Hollywoodland." The original sign represented an almost insolent dream of hope for this beleaguered nation at the fag end of the Depression; nowadays, however, it is a cliche that carries with it an irony that is almost Presidential in its obviousness. But, since the ambition of "Hollywood Arms" is to re-create the hothouse of acrimony and regret that produced the hilarious Burnett, you come to the play expecting more than just a hoary tale of pluck and luck. And, although the playwriting struck me as plodding and unfocussed, the show does bring fascinating news of the landscape of the comic interior.

The young Burnett, who is called Helen in this somewhat fictionalized version of her memoir, was abandoned by her mother, Louise, who wanted to pursue a career as an entertainment journalist, and spent her early childhood with her welfare-dependent maternal grandmother, in San Antonio, Texas. When Burnett was eight, she moved, with her grandmother, to a Los Angeles apartment adjacent to Louise's. As dramatized, the cramped, stale, Murphy-bed world she grew up in is a particularly oppressive one. Faced with the living death of her family's lamentation and resignation, Helen assumes the role of life-giver. To her grandmother, a Christian Scientist with an addiction to "spells" and sarcasm, she is a sidekick and a helpmate--"my little miracle." To her feckless alcoholic mother, she is a nurse and a solace. To her pretty, wayward younger sister, she is a caretaker. And when the projector breaks down at the local cinema, where she works as an usher--in one of the play's best scenes--it is Helen's improvised antics that literally animate dead time. Laughter becomes the public expression of her private impulse for rescue--a form of artificial respiration that revives her and those around her.

As a child, Burnett found her escape in playacting and movies (she went eight times a week). "Hollywood Arms" tries to show this, but scenically and dramatically its flourishes fall flat. As played by Sara Niemietz, the pudgy, rather mature eight-year-old Helen conveys a pliable sweetness, but not much of the rowdy, tomboy mischievousness of the comedienne-to-be. The same can be said of Donna Lynne Champlin, who makes the teen-age Helen into a sort of proper, head-girl version of Burnett. The dialogue is studded with jarring anachronisms--"Don't even go there" and "Have a nice day"--and the play becomes truly compelling only in its characterization of Burnett's steely, eccentric grandmother, Nanny (Linda Lavin), and her blinkered struggle to survive a mess that was partly of her own making. (She was married six times.)

Lavin is what sportswriters might call a "go-to girl." She is swift and smart; she has great moves; and she always scores. If you're a playwright, you want as much of your play as possible to come off her sharp tongue. Here, in a loose-fitting patterned dress, sensible black shoes, and wire-rimmed glasses, she embodies what Tennessee Williams calls "the stiff-necked pride of the defeated." She is so vivid that you can almost smell the cloying aroma of her powder. Her face is a stoic mask that hides both collapse and cunning. "With a scowl and a frown / We'll keep our peckers down," Noel Coward wrote of the kind of habitual negativity that is Nanny's stock-in-trade. ("You'll be dead in a week," she tells Helen as she sets off to make her name in New York.) Lavin paces her threadbare domain with straight-backed deliberateness. To fend off stomach pain, she sleeps with the Christian Science Monitor strapped to her midriff; for protection against all other destructive forces, her own anger included, she wraps herself in wisecracks. (Burnett once told me that her ...