If you stand in the crowded lobby of the Promenade Theatre at a little before eight almost any night this winter, you will probably see a straggling line of people who all look very unhappy. Some of them have been standing there since seven o’clock in the hope that a ticket to Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind may come free. If you glance across the lobby to where the reviews are posted, you may see that another group has unconsciously formed a second line. These people already have their tickets and are just biding time before going into the theater. Gazing respectfully at the wall, they might be congregated around a Rembrandt or a Titian; and they turn away from the reviews with that expressive mixture of exhilaration and content that people sometimes wear emerging from a concert hall or moving away from a painting in a museum. I’ve passed by the Promenade Theatre several times this season at about that hour: the scene is always the same. Which leads me to imagine it was taking place one evening in early December while a small crowd of people were demanding their money back at a theater some thirty blocks downtown.

The people in the lobby of the Samuel Beckett Theatre couldn’t have looked more displeased. They had come to see Dina Merrill in The Importance of Being Earnestand Dina Merrill wasn’t playing that evening. An understudy, Peg Small, would be performing the role of Lady