Just What the Doctor Ordered

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

There's nothing wrong with Broadway, an old adage holds, that three hit shows can't cure. Actually, not much has been wrong this season anyway. Blockbuster survivors from prior years were joined last fall by four musicals and three plays that all seem securely established, and major new works by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Neil Simon and August Wilson are still to come. But in a five-day span leading into this week, the proverbial three hit shows materialized nonetheless, one after another, gladdening the Great White Way's chronic curmudgeons.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH

John Steinbeck was haunted by the almost biblical travail of the Dust Bowl farmers, uprooted from their homesteads by bank foreclosures, trekking by the tens of thousands to the promised land of California, only to face brute exploitation as field hands. After two failed novels, he finally got it right on his third try, and after two years of developmental productions, Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe has finally succeeded in adapting his epic tale for the stage. The best measure of this portrait of a family in agony and dissolution is that it is actually better -- less sentimental and truer -- than the landmark 1940 film version.

The clearest instances of this newfound grit are the two most famous speeches. When Lois Smith, giving the finest performance of a great stage career, says as Ma Joad that she knows "the people" will endure, she offers none of the reassuring faith of Jane Darwell in the film. Her words are instead the hollow attempt of a frightened peasant to calm herself and to reassure a son she expects never to see again. When Gary Sinise as Tom Joad tells her that wherever people are organizing for freedom and a better day, he will be there, he does not ooze nature's-aristocrat nobility like Henry Fonda on celluloid. His is the tough, nervy attempt of a frightened man facing imprisonment or death to assert that his struggle has had some meaning.

Despite the grimness, director-adapter Frank Galati finds many small moments of decency, charity, humor and hope. He moves the 35 performers with cinematic grace and achieves great variety during a middle hour consisting largely of moving a rattletrap truck back and forth. The ordeal of the Joads remains evocative of its era, yet Steinbeck's themes prove contemporary: the vulnerability of unskilled labor, the soul-destroying impact of poverty and homelessness, the ease with which the rich and powerful subvert law enforcement to their own ends. The Joads pride themselves on being scrappers, but in this conflict they never have a chance.

LETTICE AND LOVAGE

Lettice Douffet is a sometime actress reduced to working as a rather fanciful tour guide in an ugly and, truth to tell (which she rarely does), unimportant English mansion called Fustian House. Faced with the unpleasant fact that hardly anything consequential or colorful ever happened there, she makes things up. To her, this is putting history to the best possible use, as inspirational contrast to what she sees as the grayness of modern life. Her employers at a preservation trust naturally disagree, and she is tossed out on her ear.

As she goes, however, a once horrified supervisor begins to be intrigued by her willful residence in a world of myth and melodrama and soon joins in exotic games -- such as acting out the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, except for the fatal bits. Lettice and her friend strive for what all history- minded tourists seek, the moment when one senses this is what it must have felt like.

Peter Shaffer (Equus, Amadeus) wrote this as a showcase for Dame Maggie Smith, the two-time Oscar winner who was last seen on Broadway in Tom Stoppard's Night and Day in 1979. All her trademark mannerisms are in evidence, from the nasal drawl of contempt to the wounded-crow flutter of arms and hands. So is the open-wound vulnerability that brings her fey lunacy back to earth. She takes a character who is mostly an idea, a conceit -- a person for whom pretending is more real than reality -- and invests her with poignancy and pride. In spirit Lettice is a one-woman show. But Smith gets splendid support from Margaret Tyzack in the thankless, stereotypical role of her clumping comrade Lotte Schoen and obliquely from Britain's Prince Charles, whose marginally less dotty tirades against contemporary architecture render Lettice's eccentricities almost trendy.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

There are plenty of reasons to stage a major Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' most erotic, bedroom-centered play -- the power and vinegar of its language, the timelessness of its obsession with money, the candor and subtlety of its homosexual subtheme -- but only one reason why it actually happened. The vital factor was the availability of Kathleen Turner, steamiest of movie queens, to play Maggie the "cat," steamiest of Williams heroines. Turner's name is billed alone above the title; her solo portrait (in a slip) graces the program cover; her presence has drawn the $2 million advance sale. Thus the crucial question is whether Turner, who debuted on Broadway in the lighthearted Gemini in 1978 and has not been back since, can handle the role. The answer is an emphatic yes. What's more, the production around her is a robust yet nuanced reading of the play.

Director Howard Davies, who staged Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Broadway, is British and, perhaps as a result, the accents are from Mars. Otherwise there is nothing to fault, from William Dudley's pillow-strewn, louvered-door set to Mark Henderson's offstage fireworks. Film veteran Charles Durning brings beguiling malice to Big Daddy, capturing the crass vitality of this aging self-made entrepreneur, while Polly Holliday, Flo on CBS-TV's erstwhile Alice, is all fluttering and giggles and connivance as his soon-to-be widow.

The center of the story is their younger son Brick, a football hero turned alcoholic who is mourning his lost youth, the fading of his athletic prowess and, above all, the death of his best friend Skipper, whose devotion to Brick was deeply, if never explicitly, sexual. In some interpretations, Brick is unquestionably homosexual himself. In others, his rage at his wife Maggie stems from her having forced him to confront an uncomfortable truth about his friend. Daniel Hugh Kelly splits the difference. His Brick unmistakably was capable of physical love with Skipper; just as unmistakably, he remains capable of physical love with Maggie in what is played as an altogether redemptive final scene. Turner's fierce and shameless yearning for him ignites the play. Her understanding and tenderness warm the last long topple into bed.