Pacino's Double Dare

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: SALOME

AUTHOR: OSCAR WILDE

TITLE: CHINESE COFFEE

AUTHOR: IRA LEWIS

WHERE: IN REPERTORY ON BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: By turns a lisping potentate and a nervy novelist, Al Pacino gives the season's foremost star turn.

When he blazed to Broadway stardom and a Tony Award in 1969 playing an embittered drug addict in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, Al Pacino showed a menacing fire. Three years later, in the most memorable of his six Oscar- nominated film roles, he revealed an even scarier core of ice as a Mafia don in the making in The Godfather. His intelligence, energy, aura of command and eerie humor should have made him America's leading classical actor. Instead, his career has been one of ample accomplishment but unfulfilled promise.

At his worst, Pacino has let himself degenerate into the mere sum of his quirks -- short stature emphasized by a rolling, shambling gait, gargling intonations, facial tics, a veritable thesaurus of hand gestures. At his best, as he is in a daring pair of roles now on Broadway, he recaptures with easy artlessness the range and power of his debut. One night he is a lisping, languorous biblical potentate, concealing deadly willfullness within a Bette Davis-like camp distraction, as King Herod in Oscar Wilde's Salome. The next night, in the new Chinese Coffee by the relatively unknown Ira Lewis, Pacino is a manic-depressive novelist-cum-doorman, living on the extreme margins of the arts world in Manhattan and dreaming that the next confessional, autobiographical manuscript will justify his colossal self-importance. The only thing the roles have in common is that both show off his grace with language, whether Wilde's shimmering, overripe, pseudo-antique prose poetry or Lewis' quintessentially Manhattan cocktail of complaint and cranky insult comedy.

Salome, although extremely talky, is wonderfully rich in mood. It convincingly mingles luxury and treachery into a romanticist's notion of ancient Middle Eastern palace life. This staging, directed by Robert Allan Ackerman with a cast of 24, is also just the sort of thing that unnerves opponents of the National Endowment for the Arts, which helped underwrite it. The title character's dance of the seven veils, performed by Sheryl Lee, is intensely erotic, authentically nude. The beheading of John the Baptist at Salome's behest, after he has thwarted her lust, is sickening yet hypnotic -- and is based on biblical-era chronicles. The pervasive homosexual passion is faithful not only to Wilde but to the culture he portrays. Pacino presides with calculated distraction and studied effeminacy that drop away, as he betrays the wayward Salome, to reveal the steely cruelty of a conqueror.

Lewis' play, in the modern budget-minded manner, has just two characters, the writer and an even more unsuccessful photographer (Charles Cioffi). They need each other's respect. Paradoxically, they also need each other's scorn because they are so disappointed that cynicism is the only thing left to trust. They squabble over money and women, but the big blowup is over a moral failing shared with almost every fictive writer: he has "stolen" his own % life, and that of his unknowing and unwilling friend, to transmute into art. Pacino radiates the desperation of a man whose last possession, his faith in his talent, is also his most fragile.

This has been a year of dozens of star names on Broadway. Pacino tops them all with a reminder of what he could have been -- and may yet become.