Philip Barry really had something in "Philadelphia Story." Eliot Nugent made a Broadway hit out of "Male Animal." Katherine Hepburn knocked her second home run in a row when she put "Woman of the Year" on celluloid. The combination should have been a sure-fire-blue-ribbon-on-the-nose-double-or-quits royal straight flush. But somehow two and two doesn't seem to make four in the theatre world. It makes a small fraction of one, called "Without Love."

It's hard to know just who to blame for this play. Everybody knows about the red haired Virgin Goddess from Connecticut. You can take her or leave her. Most people want to take her. And Nugent-well, he has a rare sense of comedy, a loping walk, a straightforward manner that is tailor-made to unfreeze the sort of female Hepburn usually plays. Neither of them is up to par in "Without Love," but the real weakness is in the play itself. Barry couldn't decide whether he wanted to write a drawing room comedy or a social drama, so he tried to do both and came out with the two hours of fumbling, amateurish dialogue that is now being pawned off on the public at the Colonial Theatre

The plot starts out to tell the same story about Washington that Barry's last vehicle told about Philadelphia. Miss Hepburn, rich daughter of a deceased senator and young widow of a man she had loved with a love to end all loves, is living in her Washington mansion the way Queen victoria lived in Windsor Castle after Vincent Price died. Eliot Nugent, sworn off of love since his best girl ditched him in Paris, is in our nation's capital trying to solve the "Irish question." Nugent gets into Hepburn's mansion (i.e, on stage) by taking her drunken cousin home from a wedding. He stays for the night, and you learn all that past history when the two principles, who can't sleep, meet downstairs at an early morning hour. Nugent says, "Tell me about yourself," so he does. Then Hepburn says, "Tell me about yourself," so he does. So they decide that, since neither of them can ever love again, they might as well get married. So they do. All this takes lots and lots of scenes, and the curtain keeps going up and down like a window shade on a windy night.

The twist is that, although they married "without love," they are really "with love," and neither knows how to put it to the other. The trouble is that this isn't much of a twist, because the audience knows it before the end of the first act. Hepburn doesn't even unfreeze gracefully. She just melts. And the Irish question is not only dragged in by the heels,--it is hung by the neck. Everything seems artificially contrived to get Hepburn and Nugent in a drawing room together, and when they get there they don't do anything.

If you really like Miss Hepburn, send her some flowers and take her to a movie some Sunday afternoon. Take her to see "Woman of the Year," if you want to. It's a darn good movie.