THEATER

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

In the pivotal scene of Neil Simon's wonderful Lost in Yonkers, which opened on Broadway last week, a mildly retarded 35-year-old woman sits her family down to tell them her plan to marry a similarly handicapped usher whom she has met a few times at a local movie theater. Poor Bella cannot get the words organized and turns to her nephews, who know the secret and awkwardly help. Her sister sits in polite confusion. Her brother, a petty gangster, impatiently tries to bolt. The clan's matriarch -- the mother whose approval is what the retarded woman most wants and will never get -- glares in stony silence.

The scene ought to be agony. Yet each time Bella rearranges the seating, dictates the flow of conversation or interrupts her tongue-tied tale to say, "This is not the way I pictured it," her frustration gets a mounting laugh. At the climax, her staccato pleadings fuse into an aria of justified rage and saintly forgiveness toward the limits imposed on her by life and by her loved ones. Abruptly, spectators who were crying with laughter are simply crying, without any sense of being manipulated. The ability to find humor in unlikely places, then shift emotional gears with no machinery showing, makes Simon a great comedist.

In the pivotal scene of the off-Broadway Absent Friends, one of two Alan Ayckbourn works from the 1970s making New York City debuts (the other, Taking Steps, opened last week on Broadway), a man rattles on about his drowned fiance to old friends who never met her. Because Colin lost his love during the first blind rapture of romance, she remains forever perfect. For friends with whom he spent times that he recalls as golden and that they barely recall at all, his ardor is tedious -- especially when he hauls out an immense volume of snapshots of the deceased. His sentimentalizing extends to their marriages, which he extols even as they cope with revelations of sexual infidelity and suffocating possessiveness. When the cheated-upon hostess is carried upstairs, hysterical, Colin assures the others she has always been high-strung from overwork at pleasing people. Ayckbourn too fiddles the emotional gears so deftly that the mood jolts from mirth to horror and back, sentence by sentence.

Ayckbourn and Simon are often compared because they are prolific (27 plays for Simon, 40-plus for Ayckbourn), they write cinematically physical comedy and, like some wines, they don't seem to travel. Simon is known in Britain mostly for films of his plays; the British Ayckbourn is staged in the U.S., but rarely in major venues. The vital thing they share is a determination to push comedy toward its mainstream limits. Absent Friends, from 1974, prefigures later and even darker works, too many not yet seen in the U.S. Lynne Meadow, who directed Woman in Mind better than Ayckbourn himself, is again shrewd, save in miscasting the clueless Peter Frechette as the guest. Fortunately, Brenda Blethyn is perfect as the nerved-up hostess. More productions like this (and fewer like the coarse, clumsy version of Taking Steps, which no fan should attend) may at last bring Ayckbourn an American acclaim.

Simon is commercially the most successful playwright in history (Shakespeare unluckily predated royalties); Lost in Yonkers debuted with advance sales of $2.3 million. Rather than rely on formulas, Simon uses success to keep testing audiences and himself. At the heart of this new play is what social workers call a dysfunctional family: a mother who was physically and psychologically abusive and four middle-aged children who still suffer the weaknesses she inflicted in teaching them to be strong. In many plays, hardened grandmothers conceal a cuddly core. Inside this woman is an iceberg, distant and adrift. When the retarded daughter has poured out longing for marriage and babies, for tenderness and some shred of affection, her mother rises and leaves the room without a gesture or word, just a slow shutting of the door.

The cast members are persuasive individually but not yet as a family, although that may come with time onstage. As the matriarch, Irene Worth, 74, lives up to her legendary reputation. But the play belongs to Mercedes Ruehl as Bella. With unrelenting energy, she veers from Gracie Allenesque comic illogic to mistrustful tantrums and wistful dreams. Simon and Ruehl have conceived her as forever adolescent, fated to be poised all her life on the edge of expectation but unable to cross over. If Simon's terrain is the border country between laughter and tears, Bella's is the no-man's-land between hope and despair. It is a terrible place to live, and an unforgettable one to visit.