Glimpses into Lost Souls

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

WHAT: TWO BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCES

WHERE: OFF-BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: All but upstaging Austin Pendleton and Julie Harris, a pair of young actors promise an exciting future.

There is a breathtaking moment of originality, of unforgettable theatrical and human truth, in the gripping new play The Fiery Furnace. Unexpectedly, it does not come from the star, five-time Tony Award winner Julie Harris. In the best tradition of off-Broadway as the place where actors get discovered, it is little-known William Fichtner, as her engaging yet explosive son-in-law, who finds a gesture worthy of Brando.

There are two startling passages in another new off-Broadway play, the keenly observed if scattershot Sophistry, set on a college campus. One features Austin Pendleton, whose credits stretch back to Fiddler on the Roof and Oh, Dad, Poor Dad. The other belongs to Anthony Rapp, 21. When they meet as teacher and student in a sexual encounter that degenerates into a harassment charge, Rapp's blend of rocketing energy and terror turned bravado rules the stage.

The pleasures of watching old pros like Harris and Pendleton are considerable. So are the pleasures of encountering more serious drama than is common on Broadway. But nothing makes off-Broadway more exciting than the emergence of new talent, the sense of a career being born. That hope is fulfilled to overflowing by Fichtner and Rapp, who both combine exhilarating talent with terrifying insight into how destruction can serve as a mask for self-destruction.

In The Fiery Furnace, Fichtner's character is confronted with having abused his wife and sons for years by a scholarly brother-in-law who pulls out a gun. Fichtner sinks into a chair, stares defiantly everywhere else and finally at his accuser, then thrusts his head forward straight into the barrel of the weapon. He conveys in the same swift deed a last spasm of dare-you defiance and a willing embrace of an end to his own pain. Although almost everything in Timothy Mason's stylistically messy melodrama has the power to surprise, nothing else comes close to that startling glimpse into a lost soul.

In Sophistry, an almost random set of fashionably themed vignettes by Jonathan Marc Sherman, the teacher and student re-enact their encounter in parallel recollections. Rapp rampages through both, first as a bratty seducer who hides doubts about his sexuality by swiveling his hips, shaking a finger cockily in the professor's face, tearing off his own clothes and collapsing in puppyish self-pity, then as a mute but furious victim. His vengeance gives Pendleton a career moment too. Reduced to a job as Santa, he stands disheveled, muttering the words of one Christmas carol while hearing the tune of another. The moment is brief but perfect -- a lesson by established talent for the new generation.