Short Takes

TELEVISION

Sarah, Plain And Simple

IT IS A PLEASURE TO MEET UP AGAIN with the Wittings, the warm, turn-of-the- century farm family introduced in Sarah, Plain and Tall, the Hallmark Hall of Fame 1991 hit. In SKYLARK (Feb. 7, CBS), the mail-order marriage of Sarah (Glenn Close) and Jacob (Christopher Walken) has turned into a tender love match, and Sarah's stepchildren are thriving. The problem is nature: a serious drought is threatening life on the Kansas plains. In Sarah, Jacob was the one who had to put his past in perspective; this time, the drought forces his wife to take a similar journey. Unfortunately, the trip is uneventful. As agreeable as it is, this visit seems less a sequel than an installment. If only one could tune in again next week for another, perhaps more dramatic, episode.

MUSIC

Still Unabashed

DOES ANYBODY REMEMBER JOHN LA MONTAINE? In 1959 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Piano Concerto, Op. 9, and went on to a career as an unabashed writer of down-to-earth tonal music. Now the composer, 72, has issued several works on the Fredonia Discs label (3947 Fredonia Drive, Hollywood, California 90068) that ought to trigger a reappraisal. Wilderness Journal, a symphony for bass- baritone (the late Donald Gramm), organ and orchestra (the National Symphony), on texts by Thoreau, surges and soars, while The Nine Lessons of Christmas lyrically transcends its seasonal origins. And La Montaine the virtuoso is represented by an engaging reading of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2 -- on the electronic keyboard, no less.

BOOKS

Scruple Test

THE GENTEEL OLD LADY EXPLAINS IT ALL in the early pages of FRAUD, Anita Brookner's new novel (Random House; $21). "She loves me, but I've taken away her life," she says of her daughter. "She will want to put me behind her, as I should have let her do years ago." Years ago and books ago. Brookner has built a reputation as Britain's foremost novelist of sensibility. Her books are true to their subjects and scrupulously written. But there comes a time when rebellion flares in the reader, who knows by now that it will take the daughter the entire narrative to escape. Her course will be unmarked by episode, and like many other Brookner creatures, she will not be pushed by the need for money. Fraud is less a novel than an examination of literary conscience.

THEATER

A Death in The Family

A WOMAN KILLS HERSELF. HER DAUGHter is attacked, twice, on the same lonely ridge. And, in THE YEARS, a middle-class family soldiers on. For her play, which covers 16 years of muffled torments, Cindy Lou Johnson borrows from Chekhov (Three Sisters), Philip Barry (Holiday) and Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart). But she has learned little from any of them about building comedy or character. Though this off-Broadway production, handsomely designed by Loren Sherman, boasts two movie-marquee names -- bossy Marcia Gay Harden, frazzled Julie Hagerty -- it is Frank Whaley (the kid at the diner in Hoffa) who carries the burden of the play and almost makes it soar. He masks an artist's passion in beguiling nonchalance.

CINEMA

Edible Complex

BLAME IT ALL ON THE SUMATRAN RAT monkeys. They were bred, the zookeeper says, when "these great big rats come scurryin' off the slave ships and raped all the little tree monkeys." Now one has bitten a New Zealand matron. And her infection will unearth a plague of zombies. It's not enough to say that DEAD ALIVE is the season's best cannibal movie -- and has the best dialogue ("Your mother ate my dog!"). Peter Jackson's travesty-tragedy is also a profound meditation on mother love and child abuse. O.K., forget profound. But there is good, broad humor amid the very gross gore effects. And when the Living Impaired stalk our hero's home, it's a family reunion out of your bloodiest nightmares.