For all his efforts to get abreast of 1968 jargon and sexual tolerance, Samuel Taylor continues to live in the past. It speaks, well for the past. Taylor's new play Avanti, the offspring of now-forgotten works by S. N. Behrman and Philip Barry, already holds its own against the best Broadway comedies current; with a little rewriting, and one much-altered performance, it could succeed on a more absolute level.

Taylor's story, as in Sabrina Fair and The Pleasure of His Company, his two best known plays, consists of little beyond a set of circumstances; their resolution is eminently forgettable, but the circumstances are these: a rich American arrives in Rome to fetch his car-crashed father's body, and finds that his father was with a woman when he died, and that the woman's daughter is in Rome too, on the same errand. You can take it from there, but you don't really have to. A third character--a friendly bisexual Italian parasite--serves as catalyst for most of the play's inaction, and as the subject of almost all its laughs.

As the Italian, Keith Baxter is droll in the best and worst sense of that awful word. The girl, Jennifer Hillary, pleasantly undercuts Baxter's greasiness and has a tolerable delivery in the fine old Joan Greenwood tradition. But Robert Reed as the American makes nothing of a vaguely interesting character; the best that can be said for him is that he has changed since The Defenders. Finally Betsy von Furstenberg has received such prominent credit in the program for her two-second walk-on that further comment would constitute overkill.