'Mr. & Mrs. Fitch' are just talk, talk, talk

It sounds like such a marvelous idea for a play (doesn't it, darling?). Cast the adorably sophisticated John Lithgow and Jennifer Ehle as married gossip columnists - fashionably chatty people of a certain age who confront threats from the Internet and reality TV while dancing around their fashionably cluttered garret all night in evening clothes and all day in silk pajamas.

Did we say chatty? What we meant is unrelenting. Unbearable, even. In "Mr. & Mrs. Fitch," playwright Douglas Carter Beane appears to have written down every literary reference, every bon mot, every social insight that ever passed his eyelids as he drifted off to slumber, then stuffed them into the nonstop mouths of these two unlikely and unlikable characters.

This may well have been a giddy joy to write. Not fun, alas, is this snappy ordeal spent with people who won't shut up. "Verbal Tourette's" is what Mrs. Fitch accuses Mr. Fitch of practicing and, yes, they only call each other by their formal appellations, or by simply darling affectations.

What an odd, artificial construct this is, sort of a painted egg so precious and pleased with itself that it brings out an inappropriate desire to smash it. Lithgow and Ehle toss themselves gamely into the verbal onslaught, but the two-hour flourish is almost as overplayed as it is overwritten.

Admittedly, Beane does come up with some dazzling turns of phrase - not just the Tourette's line but a quip about the "fourth estate sale" and the challenges of living in a "post-integrity age." Indeed, he may be the only living creature to put Viagra and Sweeney Todd in the same joke, or connect "call me Ishmael" with "call me irresponsible."

But Beane - reunited with director Scott Ellis at the theater where his "Little Dog Laughed" began - clearly wants to say something serious, not just something clever, about a culture where "gossip is just news that's interesting." The Fitches, desperate to be current again, make up a celebrity who becomes an Internet phenomenon. Their fallback career is to write a serious novel. In today's publishing world, that's a joke in itself.

WHAT "Mr. & Mrs. Fitch"

WHERE Second Stage Theatre, 305 W. 43rd St., Manhattan

INFO $70; 212-246-4422; 2st.com

BOTTOM LINE Will the chattering classes please shut up?