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NEW YORK — If you didn't walk into Broadway's Cort Theatre to see "Hollywood Arms" knowing the roots of the play, you'd be highly unlikely to guess it's about Carol Burnett's upbringing.

Although the names of her depressed, alcoholic parents, Louise and Jody, have been retained, and although the relationship between Louise and her mother contains more than a few echoes of the more raucous Eunice and Mama on Burnett's TV shows, there's barely a hint of the future celebrity in the character called Helen Melton (Sara Niemietz at age 8, Donna Lynne Champlin at 18).

Based on Burnett's 1986 memoir, "One More Time," "Hollywood Arms" was co-adapted for the stage by the author and her daughter, Carrie Hamilton, who died of cancer Jan. 20, just before the first professional production.

It is crafted in a manner reminiscent of Neil Simon's two strongest memory plays, "Brighton Beach Memoirs" and "Lost in Yonkers," but it is seldom funny, just shy of moving and irregularly stirring.

It plays like a strong, but episodic, first draft that may have been fast-tracked and surely reached Broadway because of its pedigree and probable public interest rather than its dramatic cohesiveness and polish.

The play unfolds in two time frames, 1941 and 1951.

In the rambling, episodic first act, the meddling, wind-breaking Nanny (Linda Lavin in wire frames and a cutting, pinched voice) leaves San Antonio with granddaughter Helen.

They descend upon the Hollywood Arms, a residential hotel under the landmark Hollywoodland sign, where Helen's mother Louise (former Pittsburgher Michele Pawk) has a separate apartment.

Louise has been out there for a year trying to catch fire as an actress or celebrity interviewer. Nothing went well after she began her Cesar Romero interview with: "I come to praise Cesar, not to bury him."

Louise isn't so much a bad mother as she is an unsuited, distracted one. She boozes and dates at least one unpromising lover (the unseen Nick), plus the earnest and unexciting Bill (Patrick Clear), whom Nanny champions, and has occasional visits by her oft-hospitalized ex-husband Jody (Frank Wood).

Ten years later in the second act, Helen has a younger half-sister Alice (Emily Graham-Handley) who needs rescuing. And Helen is exhibiting such a performing instinct that she's got a one-shot on Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town."

As appealing as the winsome Champlin is, she is neither cast, made up nor directed by Harold Prince to suggest a young Burnett. And that's fine.

But as well as Champlin acquits herself, particularly in a sequence in which she demonstrates how she controlled an irascible moviehouse crowd where she's ushering, nothing about her hints of the out-sized talent who was about to conquer Broadway, TV and movies. Or that someone very funny emerged from such an unhappy nest.

And consistent with the distancing of Helen from Burnett, the play does not even include the genesis of Burnett's ear-tugging, which was and is a love signal to the woman here called Nanny.

If non-musicals are to thrive on Broadway, there has to be a place for middling plays like "Hollywood Arms" that are neither regularly recycled classics ("Medea," "Hamlet," "Long Day's Journey Into Night") nor hip, profane, challenging and threatening new works in the manner of "Topdog/Underdog," "King Hedley II," "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?" and David Mamet's plays. Not at the imposing cost of today's Broadway tickets ($75-$100).

But unless you're Neil Simon, whose ratio of hits dropped sharply in the past decade, you haven't got a prayer on Broadway with a domestic family-friendly play. There is no modern equivalent to "Life With Father" or "Cheaper by the Dozen." The people who would know about such subjects seldom gravitate to today's theater; the family experience is no longer the focus of American entertainment.

Hamilton and Burnett scratch for the heart and soul of a dysfunctional family and at the end of a soiled rainbow find a pot of selfless gestures.

That the play is less than the sum of its better parts may be less important than the fact it reached Broadway at all.

Some episodes feel false, including one involving bookmaking and a police raid; there is neither a setup nor an aftermath, and so the scene feels as disenfranchised as it does expendable.

The production boasts some sterling performances, including Wood's cogent exhibition of burn out.

Lacking a role with sufficient dimension to act, Lavin supplies the tics and kvetching of a practiced harpy.

In some of her finest hours to date, Pawk bores into dead-ended weakness and lack of resolve in Louise and finds a character programmed to fail at everything.

Louise just missed. The pain she exuded all her life found an outlet a generation later in the warmth of daughter Helen's —Burnett's —work.

What Hamilton and Burnett may have been too close to the subject to see is how all that disappointment — like the character Francie's in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" — gave birth to something strong and beautiful shortly afterward.

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