Neither Gyp nor Gem

Dear Me, the Sky Is Falling, by Leonard Spigelgass. At a time when the immigrant mother is disappearing from real life, a blandly sentimental portrayal of her onstage is in such great nostalgic demand that Dear Me arrived on Broadway as a presold hit, with $400,000 in advance ticket sales and a golden barge train of 365 theater parties in tow. Its chief asset is Gertrude Berg, a supermom with a heart as big as her hutzpa.

She plays Mama Hirsch, a Westchester matron of the affluent diaspora displaced from The Bronx. Mama Hirsch is not content to throw her weight around; she shot-puts her entire family. Her daughter (Jill Kraft) lands on a psychoanalyst's couch: Should she marry a button-down stuffed shirt or donate free love to a beardless beatnik? Mama's husband (Howard Da Silva) lands on a putting green, a golf widower torn between selling his house and business and retiring to Florida, or buying out his rival and increasing his headaches. Informed that she is too meddlesomely possessive, Mama joins daughter on the couch in her own folksy way: "I like a harder mattress." The kindly psychoanalyst offers her some open-sesame seeds of wisdom--be permissive. At play's end, everyone is (Freud should pardon the expression) well adjusted.

All of this is amiably flavorsome matzo-ball soup opera. Gertrude Berg is flawless in her comic timing, wry-arch in gesticulation, a singsong bird of prey who pounces on the feeblest line for a resounding laugh. For wit, there are Jewish folk inflections; for character, stereotypes; for comic insight, racial in-group jokes. Following up on his 1959 hit, A Majority of One, Spigelgass proves that he can bring in greenback gushers without any risky drilling for dramatic art. He is a situation tinker, and his vocation is to be not a playwright but a millionaire.

Dear Me, the Sky Is Falling is that peculiarly ambivalent Broadway product, the disarmingly mindless comedy that a playgoer may attend without feeling gypped, or ignore without missing a thing.

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