From: The Social Director.

We hope you are enjoying, or will be able to enjoy, the many pleasures of the beaches this summer, including those of you who are forced to dodge raindrops while doing so. (Gee, you're dripping a little, all over this memo.)

In any case, after a day spent lolling about and possibly an evening at some outrageously tony bistro that our director of cuisine, M. LaBan, has already described, we suggest that it's time for a laugh.

And we are pleased to report that you'll find more than one of these - many, in fact, increasing rapidly in number as the evening progresses - at Cape May Stage, where a boffo cast is presenting a comedy by Andrew Bergman called Social Security, which had a decent run in 1986, when Mike Nichols directed it on Broadway.

Now, it's getting primo treatment from artistic director Roy Steinberg at the professional theater at the edge of Cape May's downtown. He gives this tale - about a couple who deal in high art as much as family high jinks - a rigorous staging on Robert J. Martin's living-room set, a handsome affair (despite the fact that a few of the paintings on its walls hang maddeningly askew).

Granted, Social Security is light as a baby seagull's feathers, but so is much of the barrier-island beach reading available to you. (It's summer. Tolstoy's for fall.) Besides, when you go for basic laughs, you might as well be tickled elegantly, by a cast that includes Lynn Cohen, who played the nanny in Sex and the City and Golda Meir in the film Munich, and who is a sheer delight in this production.

Cohen is the crotchety, aged, dependent mother who comes directly into the lives of her art-dealing daughter and son-in-law in their upscale Manhattan apartment after she's forced to leave the ho-hum home her other daughter and son-in-law occupy in the far reaches of the suburbs. Cohen, whose face is worth a thousand lines of script, must undergo a fairly quick change in character during the play - a fault of the script that becomes its real challenge - and she does so with such grace and style, you won't know you've been hoodwinked by the playwright.

Cohen appears alongside another veteran actor, Ronald Cohen - her husband in real life - who smoothly brings off the role of a great artist approaching 100 years of age. Philadelphia's excellent Grace Gonglewski is the ever-perturbed art-dealer daughter, and Neal Lerner invests the role of her husband with a pointed drollness, both in speech and looks.

Suzanne O'Donnell is on the money as the put-upon other daughter, her jaw tightened with burden throughout. And Andy Prosky - dedicating his performance to his father, the Philadelphia-born actor Robert Prosky, who died last year - is perfect as her husband, who operates somewhere between suburban-street-smart and no-brained.

No-brained? Sounds like summer fun to us.

Your Shore social director

- Uncle Howie