The Love Gap ELLIOT LOVES by Jules Feiffer

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The cartoons that Jules Feiffer syndicates to more than 100 newspapers around the globe are world crises in miniature -- angst-ridden responses by ordinary people to headline horrors and social absurdities. His plays have the same etched wit, the same arresting blend of compassion and chilly analysis and, alas for dramaturgy, the same tendency toward monologue: one of his central if unspoken themes is that people almost never speak to each other as insightfully as they speak to themselves.

Elliot Loves, which opened off-Broadway last week in an elegant staging by Mike Nichols, starts with a solo lament by a middle-aged man (Anthony Heald) on the verge of proposing marriage. It ends with him and his intended (Christine Baranski) having their first really honest conversation, via the telephone. Safely alone, if groping toward connection, they engage in dialogue by means of shared soliloquy. In the middle, the woman meets the man's old high school buddies -- an encounter that the lovers interpret in opposite ways and analyze to oblivion. Feiffer deftly satirizes self-awareness and communication, even while urging the need for them.

He also offers almost as many one-liners and acridly funny character assassinations as Neil Simon. The focus is on the tormented relations between men and women; the title character defines love as the gap between what he needs from a woman and what he actually gets and settles for. Yet the best scenes are among the aging buddies, alternately boastful that they know one another better than anyone else and gloomy that they no longer know one another at all. But then, in Feiffer's world, nobody really knows anybody anyway -- even himself.