Urban Blight

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

DERELICTS URINATE ON WALLS or from bridges onto passersby. Shopgirls get picked up in bars and wind up raped by men who think they are merely having fun. Deranged people wander about, talking to themselves or roaring confrontationally at strangers. An ill-advised glance at a fellow subway passenger leads to threats of mayhem. These are everyday realities in many big American cities, unbearable yet borne, mostly in grim, self-imposed blindness and deafness to what is all around. They somehow become more resistant to willful ignorance when placed on the stage in a play as eerily uninflected as Howard Korder's The Lights and a production as epic and energized as Mark Wing-Davy's at New York City's Lincoln Center. Without preaching, without invective, without in any way distorting urban life, The Lights makes one ashamed to dwell in a U.S. city and absorb its brutish selfishness.

Korder, one of the most promising American playwrights, reaches back in style more than a half-century to the era before the dominance of kitchen-sink realism, when the American theater was expressionistic and experimental, poetically and politically inflamed. Despite a few sentimental false notes, he is painfully apt about life in the U.S. today. But his play is set timelessly in "the modern era." Marina Draghici's set reinforces this reach for the enduring: its Art Deco windows and wire fences, beer gardens and alleys evoke the urban sense of living with the decaying legacy of the past.

Acting is almost beside the point in a piece this sweeping, which is just as well -- the players, mostly members of the Atlantic Theater formed by David Mamet, are only adequate. The play's the thing, and this one is spellbinding.