Glamour in A Housecoat SPOILS OF WAR

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

What is the most influential drama in American literary history? As plausible a candidate as any is The Glass Menagerie. Since Tennessee Williams brought his family confessional to Broadway in 1945, virtually every U.S. dramatist of substance has revealed himself in a guilt-ridden memory play, from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Eugene O'Neill's long-concealed Long Day's Journey into Night to Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky and Neil Simon's Broadway Bound. Into those ranks comes Michael Weller. Heretofore best known for Moonchildren and the screenplay of Hair, both valedictories to the '60s, Weller looks back to his adolescence, a decade earlier, in Spoils of War. His story of estranged parents and a teenage son who schemes to reunite them is a harrowing addition to the genre and the only work of lasting value to debut on Broadway this season.

The stand-in for Weller is Martin (Christopher Collet), a gawky and irritable but predictably literate youth whose clumsy idealism embraces everything from ending the cold war to a metaphorically equivalent attempt to halt the chilly state of nonrecognition between his mother and father. The parents are former leftist activists who once lived for "the movement" and each other, and now find only regret in recalling either ardor. The father (Jeffrey DeMunn) is genial enough -- a mildly successful photographer who deflects his son's attempts to romanticize him -- although his affability fades into meanspirited vehemence at the least challenge to macho authority. The exceptional person in this triangle, and the reason Weller's play can arouse memories just as vivid for onlookers as for him, is the mother Elise, played by Kate Nelligan.

Seductive yet deserted, maternal yet undependable, witty and gay in the midst of poverty and squalor, supremely self-confident and supremely self- destructive, Elise might easily seem nothing more than that old literary standby the bundle of paradoxes. As played by Nelligan, the character comes exuberantly alive. Vitality and beauty are common enough in star turns; so is warmth, although Nelligan, whose technical gifts are extraordinary, has never before shown it to this degree on the U.S. stage, and only once on film, in her 1985 performance as a heroic Greek mother in Eleni.

Her remarkable feat is to make audiences believe at once in this woman's intelligence and her ultimate helplessness, so that they view her as her son does: with affection and even admiration despite her frustrating fecklessness, her fumbling of life's every chance. From the first scene, when she serves a dinner of warm milk (hers liberally laced from a pocketbook flask) in an apartment without electricity, to the climactic reunion, when she arrives unkempt in a bedraggled housecoat and proceeds to exude glamour and sophistication from every pore, she makes life an adventure. Unlike the mother in The Glass Menagerie, whose tale of having 17 gentlemen callers seems a sad fib, Elise is convincing when she says, "I used to make quite the impression when I entered a room. I stood perfectly still, and everything moved in my direction."

There are other things to cherish, notably Alice Playten's touching portrayal of a family friend, and things to regret, including Andrew Jackness's drab, unevocative sets and director Austin Pendleton's clumsy use of them (more than once, stagehands can be seen moving furniture). But Nelligan redeems everything. The play debuted in May at Second Stage, an off- Broadway house primarily devoted to neglected American works. Thanks to a truly unforgettable star, Spoils of War need not wait for rediscovery.