The recent years of exchange between London's Shaftesbury Avenue and New York's Broadway have been fruitful ones for the theatre. The introduction of Christopher Fry and Terrence Rattigan are two of the more important benefits derived at this end, and the English can be thankful for several excellent musical comedies as well as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.

However, in the realm of comedy and mystery, there appears to be a difference in style which makes the average farce-comedy a difficult vehicle to transport. "To Dorothy a Son" is a case in point, an example of a successful West End product which does not go well here.

Some of the difficulty is inherent in the play's structure itself. The entire first act is played by one person to another off stage. It is slow and tedious, dull, and unfunny. Granted that the off-stage dialogue would hurt a native American play, many of the comedy lines which must have been well received abroad are met with stony silence at the Wilbur.

The plot is contrived to an extreme, having to do with a million dollar inheritance which can be awarded only if one of the characters gives birth to a son before a certain time. This becomes clear sometime in the middle of the second act. Unfortunately, many people who attended the opening performance had left before that time.

There are two "Americans" involved in the story. Played by Martin Rudy and Hildy Parks, they are rather sad caricatures of a big Texan and a flamboyant millionairess; the blame for this however, must go to author Roger McDougall who seems to have gotten the impression that all Americans mix Coca Cola with their scotch.

The play is noteworthy for two other reasons. The first is that one of the four leading roles is handled by a woman who appears on stage for the first time at the curtain call. She has played a nagging wife for three acts and was successful in so far as she bothered hell out of the audience.

The second is the American debut of Leslie Howard's son, Ronald. Although physically he is a dead ringer for his illustrious parent, he lacks his father's theatrical polish, drastically overacting for at least two of the three acts.