In a Fearful Free Fall

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: A LIFE IN THE THEATRE

TIME: OCT. 13, 14, 17, 19, TNT CABLE

THE BOTTOM LINE: A play about a declining old actor and an ascending young one is superbly rethought for the small screen.

David Mamet and Jack Lemmon don't seem the likeliest combination: Mamet writes about the hard shell of life, Lemmon enacts the soft underbelly. Mamet, 45, celebrates ferocious winners, while Lemmon, 68, sentimentalizes good-guy losers. Yet twice within the past year, the two have teamed for poignant results, first in the 1992 film adaptation of Mamet's Pulitzer Prize play, Glengarry Glen Ross, and now in a surprisingly warm TV version of his 1977 off-Broadway hit, A Life in the Theatre. Mamet's austere, elliptic prose seems to bring out the best in Lemmon -- his naked frustration as he fights for dignity -- without any of the fussy mannerisms and comedic cuteness that have marred many of his portraits of men in fearful free fall.

A Life in the Theatre remains, as it was on stage, a two-hander between a veteran actor (Lemmon) who never quite made it and a protege (Matthew Broderick) whose star is beginning to rise. Mamet has opened up the work shrewdly, placing the two men among backstage colleagues, on street corners, in neighborhood bars and coffee shops, making their encounters more naturalistic and believable. Yet he and director Gregory Mosher have retained enough of the stylized original to bring off satiric fragments of pseudo-plays -- costume epics and drawing-room comedies that are the antithesis of Mamet's blowtorch aesthetic.

The tension between the actors, partly sexual in the original, is all competitive now. The older man's brushes with self-destruction and madness are rooted in his loss of ease during the only part of the day that matters to him, the moments when the lights come on. Whether by design or happenstance, he is all the more touching because Lemmon's character comes across as vastly more talented than Broderick's. Only unconquerable age can lower him.

This is the ninth stage play that the TNT cable network has sensitively adapted since 1990, including Tennessee Williams' lyrical Orpheus Descending, Jon Klein's rowdy T Bone 'n Weasel and Mamet's own burst of cynicism, The Water Engine. Each has been respected yet retooled to broaden its reach. While A Life in the Theatre is steeped in particulars of the stage, it works as a powerful metaphor for life in any career. Older people are always feeling that tradition is being dishonored and their accumulated lore and knowledge devalued. Younger people always impatiently demand their turn.