Howard Moss has obviously written The Folding Green to be a witty and cogent commentary in the mannered, whimsical style that Poets' Theatre comedies frequently affect. It is thickly scattered throughout with jokes and clever remarks--many of which were greeted by the opening night audience with a justifiably damp silence.

Mr. Moss has thought up a few nice epigrams ("Drosophila are so Mendelian"; "Promiscuity is the thief of time"), and various pleasant conceits. But he has also been fecund in pseudo-epigrams ("A doctor without a disease is like a poet without a passion--a mere strummer"), and little tepid fancies (an inefficient, effeminate angel who receives celestial rebukes from the sound-effects man whenever he says, "Oh, God.") Mr. Moss writes in a tone of unflagging, unconvincing elegance, less Wilde than woolly.

What The Folding Green lacks in wit it does not make up in cogency. In the middle of the middle act, a white-wigged actress comes before the curtain to say that the author told her to say that reality and illusion is the theme of his play. This explains why the characters keep dressing up in all sorts of funny costumes and superimposing various new identities on the one with which they started; why real characters keep getting mistaken for ghosts, and vice-versa; and why it is sometimes hard to determine where anybody is at. Evidently Mr. Moss has an eye toward being some sort of mellow Pirandello, but though he uses all the standard reality-illusion devices, it is hard to tell what he is trying to do with them. It is not enough for a playwright merely to discusss "reality and illusion"; he ought at least to appear to have something to say about them.

Perhaps Mr. Moss, in his whimsical way, is kidding. Perhaps he is really interested less in reality and illusion than in money, which most of his characters spend their time discussing. (His heroine is the richest woman in the world, a sharp old cookie in gold slacks, who makes her associates jump through all sorts of hoops in hopes of getting their hands on some of her money.) But Mr. Moss has little of interest to say about money, unless it be that money is very important to people, and that they talk about it a lot. Because the play's themes are announced so carefully, it is hard not to feel short-changed at the realization that The Folding Green makes no more meaningful a statement than the merest commercial laff-riot--especially since a laff-riot it's not.

Considering what he was up against, it is no reflection on director Otto Ashermann that he was unable to create the paradoxical air of consistent and genuine artificiality that this sort of comedy demands. Dee French as the richest woman in the world and Judy O'Keeffe as her ward, Felicity, comes close to catching the requisite style. The rest of the actors make it clear that in its casting, as in its choice of plays, the Poets' Theatre must perforce be content to do what it can and not what it might wish.