From Laughter to Lamentation WOMAN IN MIND

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Drama is inherently the least realistic branch of performed literature. Movies and TV thrive on you-are-there naturalism but typically falter when they ask audiences to see more complex layerings of space, time and memory. The screen, large or small, is the place for action. The theater is the nonpareil place for inward thought outwardly expressed. Audiences can witness recollection, reverie or fantasy -- or, as surprisingly few writers have explored, outright madness.

This potential for seeing crazy moments from the crazy person's point of view is at the heart of a flawed, sentimental yet intermittently inspired comedy currently playing off-Broadway, Cave Life, in which a deranged yuppie wife conjures up a phantom lover who is a Neanderthal. More substantially, it is at the core of the two best new British plays on view in London within the past year, one discussed for a New York City staging, the other already installed. The possible transfer, Simon Gray's Melon, cues playgoers in from the start that they are entering tragic terrain: its tale of a happy man's abrupt tumble into lunacy is recounted first person in the chill of retrospect, after an equally arbitrary, untrustworthy recovery. The other play, Alan Ayckbourn's more complex Woman in Mind, gives audiences no such easy signposts and thus achieves an even richer mixture of laughter and pain. It opened last week at off-Broadway's Manhattan Theater Club in a staging by the M.T.C.'s longtime artistic director, Lynne Meadow, that excels the London original mounted by Ayckbourn himself.

Ayckbourn is often described as the Neil Simon of Britain. Both are prolific (Ayckbourn, 48, has written more than 30 plays), popular with mainstream audiences, observant of middle-class absurdities and almost compulsively funny, no matter how dark the underlying theme. The key difference: Simon has a forgiving, generous spirit toward his characters, while Ayckbourn is increasingly merciless. Audiences pause amid laughter and abruptly realize that the landscape is blasted. Ayckbourn borrowed this technique, if not much else, from Chekhov, and at his best -- as in Season's Greetings, Time and Time Again and Woman in Mind -- uses it just as effectively.

Woman begins with a semiconscious housewife (Stockard Channing) hearing her doctor (Simon Jones) speaking in apparent gibberish; it ends with her speaking it herself, turning the muddled phrase "December bee" into a last futile grasp toward sanity. Along the way, she alternates between kittenish manipulation and alienating acerbity, between sly concealment of her growing disorientation and frank revelry in it. She appears to have two families: the real ones are a dried-up vicar husband, a sanctimonious sister-in-law and an estranged adult son. The imaginary figures, who burst in accompanied by golden light and birdsong, are beautiful, adoring, suave, rich and effortlessly brilliant -- a shallow bourgeois fantasy of upper-class life, disturbing not only because the wife yearns for this escape but because she fills it with such empty pretense. In one harrowing scene, she gradually loses the / conviction that these are her fantasies and comes to fear that she is theirs. Ayckbourn and Meadow are powerfully assisted by Channing, a 1985 Tony winner, who handles her bravura role with understatement. Poignant and persuasive, hers is the performance of the New York season.