So Long, Folks. Glad We Had This Time Together, but Stardom Beckons.

CHICAGO, May 5 — Carol Burnett is entertainment royalty, and "Hollywood Arms," a play drawn from her 1986 autobiography, "One More Time," has the sheen of the official story. Written by Ms. Burnett and her daughter Carrie Hamilton, it's a proverbially bittersweet tale set in the low-rent shadow of the Hollywood hills, about a dysfunctional but well-intended family and the sweet-tempered, responsible girl who grew up to become a star.

Borrowing from the likes of Herb Gardner and Neil Simon, the play has the tone (if not the professionally honed structure) of "A Thousand Clowns West" or maybe "Venice Beach Memoirs." It is now being given its premiere at the Goodman Theater here, in a production, directed by Harold Prince (more royalty, nominal and otherwise), that is highly polished if not terribly subtle. 

The set (by Walt Spangler) naturally includes the famous Hollywood sign (historians will note that when the play begins, in 1941, the sign says "Hollywoodland," but it has been truncated for Act 2, which takes place 10 years later), as well as a glittery marquee looming over the shabby apartment where the family lives. And fortified with the reliable comic command of Linda Lavin, who is doing an imperious grandma here, not to mention a couple of adorable child actors, the show appears to be ready for export to theaters around the country in search of crowd-pleasing attractions.

A curious combination of fiction and memoir, the play renames the main character — she's called Helen, played at 8 by Sara Niemietz and 18 by Donna Lynne Champlin — but not her feckless parents (Michele Pawk and Frank Wood), who onstage as well as in Ms. Burnett's life, are named Louise and Jody.

And though the dialogue is clearly composed, and a couple of set pieces begin to emulate the skits on Ms. Burnett's television variety show (when two policemen enter to break up a bookmaking business the family is running out of the apartment, you almost expect them to be played by Harvey Korman and Lyle Waggoner), the narrative conforms more to the contours of biography than invented drama. That is, there's a lot that seems to be here because it was actually so, not because it suits a well-crafted tale. 

At least two characters, a friendly desk clerk and her precocious son, and arguably a third, Helen's younger sister, Alice, never become part of a dramaturgical whole. Helen is prone, as a girl, to mimicking radio shows on the roof of her apartment house (the Hollywood Arms), but her interest in entering show business comes as a bit of a surprise; she hides the fact that she's majoring in theater at the University of California at Los Angeles from her mother and her grandmother and from the audience. And many of the play's events — like that bookie episode — seem to occur haphazardly, as life's events often do. Without a more stringently constructed narrative, the play's momentum often sags, particularly in the first act.

None of this is completely dooming of course; but what it means is that the play doesn't persuasively argue that it is compelling in itself. Much of its interest has to do with the celebrity of its subject.

That said, Ms. Burnett's story, as it is presented here at any rate, does have its curiosities and dramatic quirks. It also has the arc of a fairy tale, though the play is told in quick-hit episodes, so the arc hiccups a bit. The father, both alcoholic and consumptive, and the mother, who has pipe dreams of becoming a journalist, are living in Hollywood and already separated when young Helen moves, with her mother's mother (Ms. Lavin), from San Antonio to a small apartment just down the hall from Louise's in the Hollywood Arms. There, Nanny, as Ms. Lavin's character is known, settles in as the mother hen to both generations of her girls, presiding grumpily over their rebellions, and urging Louise, ultimately with success, to marry her well-fixed but wimpy suitor, Bill (Patrick Clear).

Jody shows up now and then, a loving man, as played by Mr. Wood, but physically compromised and almost unbearably weak willed. As you might guess, nothing goes too well for this fractured family; poor, forever pestered by Nanny, they're always pinching pennies. (Ms. Lavin makes a formidable cheapskate.) And as Louise's dreams wither away, she, too, becomes a drunk. 

It's a story of haplessness and waste and the inexorable narrowing of lives to nothing. But because this is a star's tale, and it has a happy ending, there is something sanitized, if not gilded, about it all. Circumstances never seem oppressive or as entirely unpleasant and depressing as they must, in truth, have been. Though Ms. Lavin and Ms. Pawk have the largest roles, and they are left onstage at the end, watching the two teenage sisters, Helen and Alice, leave the nest and its privations for good, the play's thematic focus is on Helen's escape. All the melancholy in the script is in the service of this, well, Hollywood ending. (The genuine melancholy that hovers over the play is that Ms. Hamilton died of cancer in January at age 38.) 

The three best reasons to see "Hollywood Arms" are the performances of the three leading actresses. Ms. Lavin seems to have a bottomless store of facial and physical indicators of maternal authority. Crankiness and displeasure are a specialty; she's sensational at taking offense, and yet her Nanny is a warm creature in spite of this. Ms. Champlin gets the hopeful poise of a teenager with a gift for being at center stage exactly right, and in a lovely set piece she performs an entire radio melodrama for her family, playing all the parts and belting out a song, among other things reminding us what a versatile talent Carol Burnett has been from the beginning. 

But for me the real eye-opener was Ms. Pawk, a Broadway veteran but never a star, who is terrific in a terrific part. Louise is a character who begins as flirty and breezy, girlish and hopeful and ends as blowzy, regretful and resigned. 

In between she is mother, daughter, girlfriend, wife and neighbor, and Ms. Pawk not only manages to look the changing part throughout, but brings to every shift in Louise's circumstance the hardiness that you finally understand is in her character. There isn't a timid or unthoughtful moment in Ms. Pawk's performance. With or without her as a leading lady, "Hollywood Arms" is likely to have a future, but she ought to have a future as a leading lady with or without "Hollywood Arms."

HOLLYWOOD ARMS

By Carrie Hamilton and Carol Burnett; directed by Harold Prince; sets by Walt Spangler; costumes by Judith Dolan; lighting by Howell Binkley; sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen; original music composed by Robert Lindsey Nassif; production stage manager, Joseph Drummond; stage manager, T. Paul Lynch; assistant to Mr. Prince, Brad Rouse. Presented by the Goodman Theater, Robert Falls, artistic director; Roche Schulfer, executive director. At 170 North Dearborn Street, Chicago. 

WITH: Linda Lavin (Nanny), Michele Pawk (Louise), Sara Niemietz (Young Helen), Barbara E. Robertson (Dixie), Nicolas King (Malcolm), Patrick Clear (Bill), Frank Wood (Jody), Christian Kohn (Policeman No. 1), Steve Bakunas (Policeman No. 2), Donna Lynne Champlin (Older Helen) and Emily Graham-Handley (Alice).