Vision Quest For Matrons

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: A PERFECT GANESH

AUTHOR: TERRENCE MCNALLY

WHERE: OFF-BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: On a deity-guided tour of India, two grieving women walled in privacy find spiritual transport.

The audience knows it is in for an offbeat experience as soon as the first character appears, sporting an elephant's head. This is Ganesha, the Hindu god who embodies childish playfulness, zest for life and prankish humor. During the course of almost three hours, he appears in countless guises across a tourist's landscape of India, as a Japanese husband and later his wife, as a street peddler, a beggar and a leper, not to mention moments of high-spirited invisibility when he is simply a god. He attaches himself to two suburban American matrons, old enough to be grandmothers and self-aware enough to be deeply discontented with their outwardly settled world. They are looking for magic and miracles -- the magic of feeling kinship with all humanity, the miracles of expiation and self-forgiveness -- and in magical, miraculous, muddled and maddening India, they find both more and less than they sought.

Terrence McNally, the playwright of this austerely sentimental journey, is a longtime toiler in the vineyards of the theater who increasingly finds himself the height of hot. His libretto for the Broadway musical Kiss of the Spider Woman won a shower of awards including a Tony; his AIDS teleplay, Andre's Mother, won an Emmy; his domestic tragicomedy, Lips Together, Teeth Apart, has been a hit on both coasts, and Frankie and Johnny became a movie with Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. In his early hits Next and The Ritz, McNally revealed his fevered comic sense, satiric wit, robust skepticism toward authority and matter-of-fact agenda of including homosexuals in stories not "about" their world. All those are evident in A Perfect Ganesh, which is anything but an attempt to cash in on his sudden commercial appeal. There are flaws. While soundly constructed, with plenty of satisfying theatricality, the drama can be surreal, oblique and cerebral. Some parts are cute. But the play has grand ambitions and attains them.

In other hands, Ganesh might seem melodramatic. The more outspoken woman, played with aggressive vulnerability by Zoe Caldwell, is trying to reconcile herself to three facts: her favorite child grew up to be gay; he was murdered by gay-bashers; and the assailants were black, which has triggered a racism she alternately vents and recoils from. Her companion, seemingly prim, is given a deeply pragmatic and adaptive grasp of life by Frances Sternhagen in a performance as fine as any in her long career. This woman also lost a child, her firstborn, in an accident. For decades she has told no one, not even her other children, and she cannot bring herself to tell Caldwell's character at the moment when it would most comfort both of them. She does at last acknowledge the undiagnosed lump growing in her breast and the not-so-secret mistress installed by her husband in a pricey condominium. The play is about the women's coping, not their chaos.

John Tillinger's staging (with sets by Ming Cho Lee and lighting by Stephen Strawbridge) captures the architectural openness and human crowding of India, the haunted dawns and sunsets. Dominic Cuskern is a frolicsome Ganesha. Fisher Stevens plays, sometimes deftly, a dozen or so bits. The focus is the women's journey to intimacy -- achieved, ironically, after they get back home.