PLAYS: STILL THE THING

By Richard Zoglin

Have the movies and TV spoiled us for theater? Splashy Broadway musicals still provide an experience that can't be duplicated on the screen. But straight plays these days too often seem like sitcom episodes padded out for an entire evening or like rough drafts for the Hollywood movies that will (if a play runs) surely follow. The surprise is that so many talented American playwrights--most of whom make their real money churning out screenplays--keep coming back to the stage, proving that theater can still, on those occasions when the stars and stage lights align, provide a magical experience.

Psychopathia Sexualis, the latest off-Broadway effort from John Patrick Shanley (Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Four Dogs and a Bone), is, unfortunately, a model of what playwrights should avoid. It's a slim but labored farce about a young man (Andrew McCarthy) who can't make love without having his father's socks around and the psychiatrist (Edward Herrmann) who has taken them away. The stale shrink jokes wouldn't pass muster on an average episode of Seinfeld, not to mention Shanley's own better work, like his flavorful screenplay for Moonstruck. What Hollywood gave Shanley was discipline--and Cher.

Discipline is what sets David Rabe's A Question of Mercy apart from the earnest TV movies that it resembles. Recently opened at the off-Broadway theater where Rent debuted, the play follows a conflicted doctor (Zach Grenier) as he tries to help a dying aids patient (Juan Carlos Hernandez) commit suicide. TV would have turned this into a moralistic issue drama about the right to die. Under Rabe's focused gaze, it becomes a cold-eyed look at what happens when that noble ideal runs up against fallible human beings. Rabe--who in the 1970s wrote big, impassioned plays about Vietnam (Streamers)--works on a much smaller canvas here. He immerses us in clinical details--like the doctor's careful instructions on how to take a fatal dose of pills (one at a time, with as little water as possible) or the compulsive conversation of the victim's lover (Stephen Spinella), who forces himself to go out to a movie when the deed is done. The narrow focus can be constricting (this is a small play on a big theme), but Rabe's jittery, naturalistic dialogue and Douglas Hughes' knife-edge direction make it a powerful, unmistakably theatrical event.

Hollywood has been good to Alfred Uhry. His first play, Driving Miss Daisy, was turned into an enormously popular movie, which won him an Oscar. His second, The Last Night of Ballyhoo, which just opened on Broadway, seems made to order for the movies as well: an old-fashioned family comedy-drama, set in Atlanta in 1939, on the eve of the premiere of Gone With the Wind. But it's a wonderful play on its own terms--richer, more textured than the rather schematic Miss Daisy, its originality rising subtly out of familiar elements.

Lala Levy (Jessica Hecht) is a socially awkward young Jewish woman, back home in Atlanta after an aborted semester at the University of Michigan. In between decorating the Christmas tree and ogling the Hollywood celebrities in town, she is trying to get a date for the big event of the Jewish social year, known as Ballyhoo. Reacting in various ways to her travails are her widowed mother; the unmarried uncle and widowed aunt who live with them; and her prettier, more socially assured cousin, home from Wellesley.

There's a comforting, Meet Me in St. Louis sweetness in the way this clan faces its small crises. But Uhry adds vinegar in the form of a sharply observed portrait of upper-middle-class Jews in the pre-World War II South. Theirs was a tricky dance of assimilation and accommodation, in which older families, like Lala's, scorned newer immigrants, represented by the kid from Brooklyn who has just gone to work for the family business. Uhry juggles a lot of elements with no evident strain: creating a believable family that seems both quirky and emblematic; exploring issues of Jewish self-hatred; giving hints of The Glass Menagerie and then taking a sharp right turn. Hollywood will probably shower the play with stars, but most likely will miss the delicacy of Ron Lagomarsino's understated direction and Dana Ivey's touching performance as Lala's stern, no-nonsense mother. She can get a laugh and evoke a lifetime of prefeminist frustration with a single line ("If I were running the Dixie Bedding Company, we'd all be rich by now") and find fresh heartbreak in the simplest lament: "I thought we were going to be happy when we grew up." That's not Hollywood schmaltz, folks; it's the real thing.