Double, Trouble and Bubble

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

That perennial invalid, Broadway, is faring better this season but hardly thriving. The theater year started more than nine months ago, with the cutoff for last spring's Tony Awards. It has produced only two new American plays that are still running. Add two London imports and three revivals--one of which, Blood Knot, closes this week--and there you have it: the total of non- musical survivors on the Great Gray Way. Why, then, does New York City seem abuzz with theatrical vitality? In large part because Off Broadway is providing a satisfying mix of star turns, ensemble work, deft new writing and apt revivals. Operating in smaller spaces, under less daunting financial pressures, off-Broadway's mostly nonprofit companies have mounted half a dozen recent shows demonstrating artistry and elan.

The best new play of the crop is Rum and Coke, a wry, poignant look back at the can-do optimism and patriotic naivete that led the U.S. to stumble into the Bay of Pigs invasion. Playwright Keith Reddin, 29, was a child of four when CIA-backed Cuban insurgents made their disastrous landing in 1961, but he captures with compassion and accuracy the Kennedy Administration's fundamental miscalculation: the belief in a nonexistent Cuban underground that was only waiting for a signal of support to rise up and overthrow Fidel Castro. Reddin presents the Bay of Pigs fiasco as a dress rehearsal by America's best and brightest for their misjudgments in Viet Nam. Some of the funniest scenes depict the white-collar macho of bureaucrats who react to caution as a sign of deficient manhood. Reddin's cutting strokes are more often subtle, as in brief, oddly sympathetic glimpses of Castro and Richard Nixon. The central character is an eager, puppyish former Yalie tapped to train the invaders in communications. Peter MacNicol--best known as the neophyte writer Stingo in the film Sophie's Choice--is brilliant in the part, shifting from gawky innocence to sadder but wiser recollection and infusing it all with the self- intoxicating energy of the New Frontier. He is ably assisted by Polly Draper as a needling older sister and especially by Tony Plana as the most soulful and ultimately most disillusioned of the Cubans.

Reddin is bringing off a rare double: while his words resound in Rum and Coke, he is onstage 20 blocks away in a manic revival of the 1930s farce Room Service, a portrait of pre-Broadway opening desperation. Reddin winningly playswhat else?--the playwright, a geeky kid from Oswego who eventually has to "die" for an hour and a half so that his show might live. Director Alan Arkin seems too conscious that Room Service was adapted as a Marx Brothers movie vehicle. Mark Hamill, the fresh-faced Luke Skywalker of the Star Wars series, is mustached and growly as an imitation Groucho; Lonny Price giggles and cavorts as a talking Harpo; Andrew Bloch is less derivative, but he is not distinctively anything else either. These performances have charm, but they bring to mind the inimitable pleasures of the originals.

Farce works best when played deadpan, as Director John Tillinger proves in an impeccable revival of Joe Orton's seductively rude and cynical Loot. The plot is outrageous. Two low-life young men, sometime lovers but far from possessive (their sexual preference, apparently, is "yes"), rob a bank. They stash their takings in a coffin, which until then has contained the corpse of the mother of one of them. They are joined in connivance by a nurse who has murdered eight people. A shamelessly deceitful policeman hounds all three, then conceals the crimes for a share of the proceeds. Only the blameless bereaved widower goes to prison, betrayed by his own son. This exercise in psychopathology unfolds like epigrammatic slapstick, half languid Oscar Wilde, half hotfoot Inspector Clouseau. The performances are in a melange of styles but all delightful: Charles Keating, dour and almost ethereal as the husband; Zoe Wanamaker, aggressive and prone to double takes as the nurse; Joseph Maher, bellowing and apoplectic as the detective; Zeljko Ivanek, pensive and winsome as the son, and Kevin Bacon (the dancing rebel of the movie Footloose), glittery-eyed and giddy as his cheekily amoral mate. Orton's wit is most sardonic when the detective interrogates the son, who can commit any sin against his Catholic upbringing except to tell a lie. Maher mauls the young man and shouts, "Under any other political system, I'd have you on the floor in tears." Ivanek accurately replies, "You do have me on the floor in tears."

The balance of off-Broadway offerings range from Eric Bogosian's ferocious sequence of solo sketches, Drinking in America, through Poet Donald Hall's wistful memoir of country life, The Bone Ring, to a bravura performance by Geraldine Page in Somerset Maugham's sour 1921 inversion of drawing-room comedy, The Circle. Bogosian, a captivating writer-actor, brings depth and pathos to a coke-snuffling, liquor-sodden Hollywood agent, a giggling young hoodlum, a despondent street black, a self-promoting salesman. In The Bone Ring, a slight, tender work that deserves a long life in regional theaters, George Hall and Lenka Peterson evoke the grandparents most people can only wish they had. Page, who won her eighth Oscar nomination for her performance in the film The Trip to Bountiful, is often mannered even when roles do not demand it. But she is in her element in Maugham's debate among two generations of wealthy aristocrats who give up everything for romantic happiness. Painted and wigged, mincing and coy, she brings alive a coquette decayed into a clown. Then, all at once, her eyes glow with conviction and she is suffused with ageless charm as, from impassioned memory, she pleads the case for love. Off Broadway or on, for ripsnorting acting of the old school, it would seem impossible to top her portrayal of the raddled ruin of a beauty.