For its third season opener, the Cambridge Summer Theater has chosen wisely. In the present Kaufman-Hart comedy it has succeeded in getting into the swing of the new season with a minimum of jerkiness and no sign of stiffness in the joints. There is evidence of much pre-season conditioning and careful planing. "George Washington Slept Here" is ideal for adaptation to the intimacy and informality of the summer stage, and the cast takes full advantage of the situation.

The play itself is frisk, witty, and occasionally over-brittle in the usual Kaufman-Hart style. It revolves with enjoyable triviality about the back-to-nature mania of a city bred business man who buys a dilapidated farmhouse and then sees his hopes of an idyllic old age threatened, respectively, by a wife whose love for things rural extends very little beyond Central Park, a mortgage held by the neighborhood crank, and the explosion of a rich uncle myth into the reality of a parasitical poor relation.

It is a story that can be completely made or broken by the cast, and here the Cambridge Players are the makers of an enjoyable production. Cobra Wither spoon as guest star and leading lady takes her part in easy and capable stride, that puts and audience at case and draws the best out of the supporting cast. Jack Sheehan, Allan Tower, Louise Kanasireff, and actor-director Robert Perry match her with professional experience and smoothness. Also, there is the usual and pleasant sprinkling of handsome young actors and beautiful young actresses that have come to be a welcome characteristic of the summer stage. Of the latter category, Richard Barthelmess' daughter Mary is unquestionably the most beautiful and the most pleasant. A great deal of credit also goes to pinch-hitter Jolyon Baker for his playing of the nephew-in-everybody'shair, which he learned in the afternoon before the opening. Except for an occasional drag where clever dialogue fails to make up for lack of action, and the overplaying of a couple of necessarily riotous scenes, "George Washington Slept Here" is a happy beginning for the coming season at Brattle Hall.