Behrman's Funny Valentine

Marion Froude is a force. She's as tall and slender-waisted as Katharine Hepburn in her long, fitted dresses, and the sparkle in her eye charms visitors to her bohemian loft into bashful, blushing submission. She's a breath of gay Paris and anything-goes Vienna, Austria, in the dry, hard-edged New York of 1932. Marion, now 40, doesn't flirt, exactly; her warmth and beauty simply rush over you, quickening your pulse. Over here, darling, her companionable smile says. This is living.

Marion is the heroine of S.N. Behrman's 1932 drawing-room comedy "Biography," and in J.R. Sullivan's delightful revival, now at the Pearl theater, it's hard not to adore her as much as Behrman did. Frank and generous-hearted, with a quick wit and a mischievous streak that crinkles her pretty brow, Marion (superbly played by Carolyn McCormick) is one of those rare literary inventions: a contented independent woman.

With Marion the painter holding court in her atelier, a series of visitors popping in and out on their way to dinner engagements, and a German-speaking housekeeper furnishing comic relief, "Biography" seems like Yankee Noël Coward at first glance. But this is a comedy with sharp and poignant ideas about subjects that have lost none of their relevance in the intervening 75 years — the phenomenon of celebrity, the nature of tolerance, and the compromises one shouldn't make for love.

Marion supports herself by painting second-rate portraits of first-rank subjects, but she nourishes herself by making friends — and by taking a series of lovers, often celebrated men. When a scrappy young pup of an editor named Richard Kurt (Sean McNall) offers Marion a new outlet, writing her memoirs for a tabloid serial, she at first recoils against what she sees as a burgeoning popular taste for "loudspeakers in the confessional."

But there are no such issues for the hard-nosed, cynical Mr. Kurt, whose Bogartian bluster comes out in the clipped sentences of the early talkies (where Behrman often toiled). Kurt makes an interesting foil for Marion, whose equally polished repartee embodies the drawing-room elegance he despises. He's all rude, hard-driving arrogance, but it's Marion's mission to find out where that massive chip on his shoulder originated.

While Marion is falling for Kurt, an old lover, Leander Nolan (Tom Galantich), is falling for Marion — again. Leander, however, is engaged to a girl whose rich father is going to make him a senator — if only Marion won't write about him in her memoirs. But partly out of curiosity, partly out of financial need, Marion has begun writing her autobiography, which she has turned into a source of goodhearted amusement, narrating her adventures without much regard for the narrator.

Behrman's comedy has marvelously appealing surfaces, with its remarkably durable banter and entertaining juxtapositions of characters. But it's the underlying earnestness of Marion's character that hooks you. In 1932, she is a crusader for tolerance — which, for her, amounts to being amused, rather than inflamed, by difference. She can't abide the way American men want to make questions of sex and reputation into causes. "My God," she tells one of them, "You take it so big!"

Yet in spite of herself, Marion falls for the heroic crusader type — and therein lies the rub. She likes spiritedness — in all its varieties — but her own resolute one gets in the way of many a union. Ultimately, she admits to an "immutable difference in temperament."

"Biography" is by no means perfect, but like its irrepressible heroine, it never fails to charm, provoke, and delight. An abrupt second act finale is redeemed by the sheer pleasure of the third act, which begins by dropping the editor, the would-be senator, his fiancée, and her father in Marion's studio, and ends with a pair of poignant farewells that disclose Marion at last.

The revival's capable director, J.R. Sullivan, sweeps the action and repartee along with champagne sophistication and crackling timing. Messrs. McNall and Galantich deliver marvelous turns as Marion's rival admirers. But it's Ms. McCormick's dazzling performance as Marion that puts the lilt in this old-time song. Like many a great old standard, "Biography" can cut you to the quick with its humor and its humanism.

Until May 20 (80 St. Marks Place, between First Avenue and Avenue A, 212-352-3101).