Reborn With Relevance

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

WORKS: THREE NEW AMERICAN PLAYS

AUTHORS: LARRY KRAMER, DAVID MAMET, WENDY WASSERSTEIN

WHERE: OFF-BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: One evokes compassion, another fury at injustice, and a third worldly laughter -- all cause for cheers.

EVEN WHEN THE GREAT WHITE Way glittered the brightest, it would have been an exceptional week that brought the openings of fiercely funny and trenchantly topical plays by three of the nation's leading dramatists. But if the theater seemed reborn with relevance last week -- thanks to Larry Kramer's poignant gay Bildungsroman, The Destiny of Me, David Mamet's lapel-grabbing vision of political correctness cum intellectual terrorism in Oleanna and Wendy Wasserstein's drawing-room comedy with claws, The Sisters Rosensweig -- Broadway was not part of the buzz. For reasons ranging from finances to the tyranny of reviews, the producers of all three chose to open off-Broadway. Artistically, the week couldn't have been much richer. Economically, the theater still seems to be passing the hat.

The showiest piece and ultimately the most moving is Kramer's tussle between hope and despair in Destiny. It is enriching, but not necessary, to know that the work is autobiographical and that its passion-spent central character, Ned Weeks, is a stand-in for the author, who co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis and the more radical ACT UP only to leave each in disappointment at their failure to save lives, not least, prospectively, his own. Ned is as hilariously self-congratulatory and self-critical as he was in the Kramer play that introduced him, The Normal Heart, and Jonathan Hadary gives the performance of the year balancing his rage and puckish mockery.

In style, Destiny is everything Kramer has heretofore claimed to detest -- a nonrealistic memory play, crosscutting between the present in a high-powered AIDS clinic and Ned's childhood and adolescence in bourgeois-Jewish suburban Washington. The guilt he endures, the abuse, the rejection by even well- meaning relatives -- above all the preposterous but persistent demand by his parents that he lead the life they envisioned -- are all part of almost any gay adult's personal legacy. If not always richly detailed in the writing, the moments are staged by Marshall Mason with unusual power. As the younger Ned, John Cameron Mitchell is touching but seemingly too sweet and girlish to have ripened into the tough, caustic adult Ned. But perhaps this is Kramer's deepest point -- that the corrosive gap between boy and man was wrought by the unloving world around him. More than a play about AIDS and death, The Destiny of Me is a play about homosexuality and life. It is irate, not about dying but about having been unable to live and love.

At the other end of the scale of suffering is Wasserstein's wry comedy about three sisters (yes, they make frequent references to Chekhov) whose problem is not failing to get to Moscow but failing to stay, spiritually, in their ancestral Jewish Brooklyn. All three are compulsive achievers. The eldest, broodingly played by Jane Alexander, is a global banker based in London, where the others have come to visit. The youngest (Frances McDormand) is a tomboyish travel writer who lives more for the escape of travel than for the art of writing. The middle sister (Madeline Kahn) is a self-credentialed / psychotherapist who has a radio talk show, a Gracie Allen fey charm and unyielding dreams of vulgar fame.

The other characters include the banker's daughter, a student whose delving into family history prompts her elders to do the same, and four men who appear vital to these women's lives but who are one by one sloughed off. Wasserstein is interested in serious issues; the sisters are assimilated Jews who only slowly reawaken to the importance of their culture and religion, while on the periphery the men debate a host of topics from current headlines. But in form and uproarious dialogue the play is a commercial comedy. On that level, Sisters is a delight and is exquisitely performed, especially by Kahn as the ditsiest, daffiest and ultimately most devious of this matriarchal clan.

Mamet's Oleanna sets up an innocent-looking encounter between a baffled and seemingly despondent college student (played by Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon) and a haughty and fashionably iconoclastic professor (William H. Macy). His office remarks to her, lashed to a Procrustean bed of rhetorical propriety, wildly and perhaps willfully misinterpreted, become her basis for bringing formal disciplinary charges. He is accused of everything from sexual harassment to disrespect for the learning process. But his worst crime in her eyes is the "elitism" of daring to think that having something to impart makes him more important than those who come to learn. Trying to explain himself, he meets with her again, is goaded anew and makes things worse.

By the end, the professor resembles the broken-spirited figures in anticommunist plays by Pinter or Havel, ready to comply with anything just to end the humiliation and pain. His ugly spiral downward is at once outlandish and entirely plausible, and it had this audience member virtually leaping out of his chair in fury at the injustice and unreason. Whatever the bumps -- and there are a few in Mamet's staging of his text -- the power to incense, like that to sadden or amuse, is reason enough to cheer for the future of the theater.