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DORSET, VT., Playhouse. Any Wednesday. An executive sweetie is kept in a suite as a tax and marriage dodge until the executive wife pays a not very social call. Aug. 31-Sept. 3.
MATUNUCK, R.I., Theater-by-the-Sea. Barefoot in the Park. If wedding albums included the days after the honeymoon, there would be pictures of the ridiculous rather than the sublime. In this Neil Simon play, the period of adjustment for a love-and-poetry wife and her meat-and-potatoes husband sparks the humor. Aug. 28-Sept. 2.
FITCH BURG, MASS., Lake Whalom Playhouse. Tom Ewell plays the put-upon psychiatrist who understands everyone but his own teen-age terribles going through The Impossible Years, Aug. 21-27.
WOODSTOCK, VT., Little Theater. Neil Simon's Come Blow Your Horn, a tale of two brothers, reaps a harvest of hilarity, Aug. 22-26.
JENNERSTOWN, PA., Mountain Playhouse. Never Too Late is a one-gag show that takes off when a middle-aged wife tells her very middle-aged husband that they are to have another child. Papa-to-be protests: "When he gets out of college, I'll be going on 83—if he's smart." Sept. 4-9.
ALEXANDRIA, MINN., Theater L'Homme Dieu. Moliere's classic spoof of the medical profession, The Imaginary Invalid, tells of a hypochondriac hypocrite who discovers that the only way to save on bills is to become a doctor himself. Aug. 23-27.
CINEMA
UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE. Bel Kaufman's novel about a high school teacher in a Manhattan slum has been turned into an entertainment of high spirits, its sheen unscratched by the book's real point.
THE BIRDS, THE BEES AND THE ITALIANS. Director Pietro Germi (Divorce—Italian Style) conducts a boisterous travelogue through the bedrooms of a small Italian city, and finds Virna Lisi in one of them.
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. In Mississippi, two policemen, one a Negro (Sidney Poitier), the other a white man (Rod Steiger), join forces to solve a murder in this subtle and meticulous study that breaks with the black-white stereotype.
THE WHISPERERS. Dame Edith Evans gives a soaring portrayal of a lonely old lady whose companions are the unheard voices that speak to her cobwebbed mind.
DIVORCE AMERICAN STYLE. A slick, cynical film that nevertheless has the courage to show Dick Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds as less than sympathetic.
THE FAMILY WAY. A young couple (Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett) who cannot consummate their marriage are the subjects of this comedy that owes a lot of its depth to an extraordinary performance by John Mills as the groom's father.
EL DORADO. John Wayne and Robert Mitchum get the most out of a script full of raucous frontier humor in this fist-come, fist-served western.
BOOKS
NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA, by Robert K. Massie. With impassive clarity, Freelance Journalist Massie details the tragedy of the last of the Romanovs, Czar Nicholas II and his wife, two innocents in a disintegrating toy world.
BEARDSLEY, by Stanley Weintraub. Aubrey Beardsley's life was dedicated to decadence, but this evocative new biography—plus the current Beardsley revival —is evidence that he failed.
RIVERS OF BLOOD, YEARS OF DARKNESS, by Robert Conot. A skillful autopsy of the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles performed by a Los Angeles newspaperman.