THE HUMOR OF BILE AND BITE

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

"If you weren't depressed you'd be an idiot," one character tells another in Woody Allen's one-acter, Central Park West. The words might equally sum up either of the other two short plays, An Interview and Hotline, that opened off-Broadway last week under the collective title Death Defying Acts. All three offer humor of bile and bite.

David Mamet's cryptic, Kafkaesque An Interview takes place between the Attorney (Paul Guilfoyle) and the Attendant (Gerry Becker). Theirs is an encounter between a terrier and a sphinx: lots of barking on one side, stony silence on the other. The Attorney has apparently been summoned to defend his life, and as his exasperation rises, Guilfoyle displays a wonderfully mobile range of faces: puzzlement, gloating self-assertion, crumpled resignation. If An Interview finally seems like a one-joke drama, it's dexterous enough to dispense a little wallop of spooky uneasiness.

Elaine May's Hotline is brief too, but with all its abusive, foul-mouthed yelling it feels long. Linda Lavin portrays a despairing prostitute who phones a suicide-prevention center, where she reaches an overconfident staff member (played, again deftly, by Becker). May places considerable demands on her actors. For one thing, she asks the drama to drag, literally: after swallowing handfuls of pills, Lavin crawls around her apartment, moaning wisecracks. For another, May has contrived a tale that, in a compressed space, moves from squalor to redemption. That the ending works as well as it does suggests that there's a better play here, potentially, than the one we have.

When the curtain rises on Central Park West, we realize we're back in Allenland--that ingenious, engaging and occasionally claustrophobic terrain. We know the props: shrink jokes, sexual put-downs, etc. Debra Monk is Phyllis, a psychotherapist who, having discovered that her husband Sam (Guilfoyle) is unfaithful, seeks solace from her friend Carol (Lavin). Or so it seems. Turns out that Phyllis isn't looking for comfort but revenge: she suspects it is Carol her husband has been sleeping with. Carol counters by announcing that she and Sam, desperately in love, will be moving to London. Or so it seems.

The play has all the clever twists we look for in a romantic farce. Yet in its bitterness and scorching profanity, it is miles from the lightheartedness of traditional farce. It's an unsteady, if engrossing, marriage of the light and bubbly and the down and dirty. One result is that its implausibilities nag us as they wouldn't in pure farce, where nobody asks that things stay plausible so long as they remain entertaining.

In all three plays, what's good is quite good, and what isn't is at least adroit and intelligent. And if you leave the theater with conflicted emotions, that's only to be expected. Mixed feelings are, after all, what Death Defying Acts aspires to: troubled laughter.