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DORAL'S THEORY OF EVOLUTION:
[[image: in background, sunset sky or image of sun]]3 cigarettes facing reader end-on; next to each is text as follows]]
CIRCA 1900
Cigarettes looked like this, plain end, no filter, often had a harsh taste.

CIRCA 1955
Fiber filters like this became popular. They were often added to the same old tobacco.

CIRCA 1975
The advanced state of the art today: Rich tobacco, custom-blended for a modern, chambered filter, lower in 'tar' and even better in taste. This cigarette is Doral.

[[image: one closed methol pack, one open regular filter packet of 20 DORAL 'CLASS A' cigarettes.]]
Doral: The advanced state of the art--lower in 'tar' and even better in taste.

[[the small print]]FILTER, MENTHOL: 14mg. "tar", 1.0 mg.
nicotine, av. per cigarette, FTC Report OCT. '74.

[[in white text box]] Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.

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MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS?

An interview with the author of "Same Time, Next Year"
By Joan Alleman Rubin

Whatever problems the institution of marriage may be having elsewhere, it seems to be keeping its good name on Broadway. Pippin ends in an ode to reluctant togetherness. Absurd Person Singular gives a glimpse of three couples who are sticking through sick and sin. In Praise of Love endorses that old fashioned romantic notion that a "good wife" always makes her husband believe he is the strong one, despite all evidence to the contrary.

And now, of course, there's Same Time, Next Year, the biggest hit in a smashing season and a play destined for longevity on Broadway and a heftier afterlife than Marley's ghost (two characters, one set, a universally appealing plot--you can expect it in stock companies, dinner theatres, community theatres for decades).

The play is about a man and a woman, both married, but not to each other, who rendezvous in the same motel once each year for 25 years. (We see them in 1951, '56, '61, '65, '70, '75.) The two characters, Doris and George, played brilliantly by Ellen Burstyn and Charles Grodin, are likeable, decent people, who care for each other and for their respective spouses -- each time they meet she tells him one good and one bad story about her husband; he tells her one good and one bad story about his wife. It's a warm, rewarding, safe relationship. There's never much doubt in their minds, that their marriages will stay intact.

In an age which glorifies "now," Same Time, Next Year stresses "now and then." The play comes on strong for the positive value of having someone who sees and loves, not only the person you are this year, but all those other people you've been along the way. Now that's a pretty conventional (really not a dirty word) notion and I was curious to see if the playwright, Bernard Slade, a former actor and television writer might (under his beard

[[image: man and woman sitting up in bed talking together, an ornate wooden headrest behind them.]]
[[caption]]Ellen Burstyn and Charles Grodin, the stars of Bernard Slade's hit comedy Same Time, Next Year.
[[/caption]]

and fading California tan) turn out to be an old-fashioned man.

"I've been married 20 years... these days some people think that's ridiculous, so I say it in a low voice," Slade told me. "I can't say I buy the abstract idea of spending all of one's life with the same person, as a matter of fact in the abstract it sounds pretty terrible. I believe my wife Jill and I have been incredibly lucky. I guess one secret to a long marriage is liking each other. The other is having a life apart from the marriage -- not being thought of as a pair." (When the Slades married in the early 50's, both were actors in Canada. Ten years ago when Bernard and Jill and their two children moved to L.A., Jill went back to college. In the play Doris also returns to college where she describes herself as "the only person in the class with a clear complexion," a line Slade confesses unabashedly is Jill's.)

So we can assume that Bernard Slade knows something about marriage, and though he does not pretend to have written a play on the subject ("Same Time, Next Year is an entertainment; it sometimes emembarrasses