Three for A Two-Way Exchange

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Off-Broadway often thinks of itself as the "regional theater" of New York City. Part of its affinity with the theatrical provinces is financial. Although there are occasional commercial ventures, the off-Broadway scene, like the regionals, tends to be dominated by nonprofit companies sustained through donations. The bond is also aesthetic. The nonprofit troupes usually measure success artistically rather than at the box office and eagerly nurture esoteric work -- chamber musicals, offbeat new plays, quirky revivals.

The sense of kinship with out-of-towners has not necessarily diminished New York's role as cultural arbiter. Just as Broadway hits go on tour, so off- Broadway successes dot the schedules of regional theaters a year or two later. In recent seasons, however, the cultural exchange has begun to work both ways, with regional theaters that have developed promising productions often joining forces with Manhattan institutions or producers. That is the case with two current off-Broadway delights: a lively feminist interpretation of the British social-class comedy Educating Rita by Chicago's Steppenwolf, the ensemble's sixth foray into Manhattan in the past five seasons; and a bewitchingly surreal satire with songs, Three Postcards, the second offering this season originated by California's South Coast Repertory, which, despite its setting in conservative Orange County, south of Los Angeles, specializes in avant- garde premieres.

Willy Russell's Rita was a risky choice for Steppenwolf and the two performers, Austin Pendleton and Laurie Metcalf: audiences were likely to have vivid memories of the 1983 film that won Oscar nominations for Michael Caine and Julie Walters as a drunken, shambling university teacher and his bright but unschooled adult-education pupil. But the troupe has put its own stamp on the show, particularly in Metcalf's performance, which persuasively blends resurgent hope and hints of fiercely suppressed desperation. The romance that dominated the film is played down, and the title character emerges as no winsome waif but an embodiment of sheer willpower.

From the moment Metcalf stalks into Pendleton's office, she is obviously a woman of brains and determination. She brushes aside her teacher's advances. ; She is looking not for a more upscale successor to her loutish husband but for a fuller sense of herself. Uncluttered by flirtation, the contrast between the student's will to win and her teacher's self-destructive need to fail emerges sharply, and the play becomes a discerning essay on how much of anyone's fate is self-imposed. Like Emlyn Williams' The Corn Is Green, to which it owes its basic theme, this Rita convincingly argues that the discovery of learning is far more seductive, even to the young, than the exploration of mere sex.

Three Postcards is outwardly a work of serene, minimalist simplicity. Three women, no longer girls and not yet matrons, meet for a meal at a trendy restaurant. Some of their talk is about how much they matter to one another, but they do not communicate. Only in daydreams and memories (enacted in scenes interspersed with their meal) do they reveal much of what they are really feeling. Then a casual question makes plain that the woman who seems the most contented is in fact coping with cruel domestic tragedy and that her friends' seeming triviality amounts to a benign conspiracy of silence to allow her a few moments of escape.

This poignant material is told obliquely and often with a fey nuttiness. The audience begins to understand that it has stepped outside the literal world when the most neurotically self-absorbed of the women confides to one of her companions that the waiter hates her, and a few moments later, he does indeed turn and say, deadpan, "I hate you." At South Coast Repertory's handsome stage, the show had a visual sleekness that it somewhat lacks in the more rudimentary facilities of the New York City producer, Playwrights Horizons. But the elegance of the storytelling survives and reflects more than two years of collaborative work put into it by Playwright Craig Lucas, Composer Craig Carnelia, Director Norman Rene and the hugely likable cast.

Playwrights Horizons has become probably New York's foremost showcase for new stage writing. Its second, smaller space is now home to Driving Miss Daisy, an intimate tale of a Southern Jewish woman (Dana Ivey) and her black chauffeur (Morgan Freeman), told in vignettes ranging from just after World War II to the era of the civil rights movement. This little gem echoes decades of social change yet never loses focus on the peculiar equilibrium between servant and served. It reaches a peak when the old woman goes to a banquet honoring Martin Luther King Jr. -- an event her liberal but conformist | businessman son (Ray Gill) refuses to attend -- and cannot quite bring herself to invite the driver to accompany her until the moment they reach the hotel, when his dignity compels him to refuse.

In competition with Broadway fare, Miss Daisy last week won Drama Desk Award nominations for Playwright Alfred Uhry, Director Ron Lagomarsino and all three members of the well-nigh perfect cast. Attempts are under way to move it to a larger theater, and eventually it seems fated to follow the traditional happy path of an off-Broadway hit: toward a long and honorable life in regional theaters across America.