The Century, Tryst By Tryst

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Ignored or used as a sex pillow by her uptight husband, fed up with nights at the opera among his colleagues and days of packing trunks for his business trips, a '50s housewife lapses into reverie. In her mind and in apparent actuality on stage, she slips his embrace, walks to the mirror and sees another woman. They look, smile, touch and ultimately dance a stately, sensual ballroom swirl of self-discovery.

In the next scene the same husband is aboard the Titanic, ardently seducing a cheeky lad from steerage who points out that the ship has become "tilty." In the scene after, the streetwise youth is a dim but pretty, gay disco pickup in the '70s. This sort of inventive time bending, accompanied by a catchall range of song styles to span the century, tryst by tryst, is what makes off- Broadway's Hello Again the one interesting musical of this scratchy season and its creator, composer-librettist-lyricist Michael John LaChiusa, the big breakthrough talent.

Despite years of worthy work, LaChiusa was a virtual unknown until a couple of months ago, when his equally imaginative First Lady Suite opened a too brief run off-Broadway. That collage featured a time-traveling romp in which Mamie Eisenhower caught her husband with a mistress, then journeyed with Marian Anderson to watch Ike integrate Little Rock, Arkansas; an eerie dream song in which a secretary to the Kennedys envisioned, on her way to the fateful motorcade in Dallas, the events about to unfold; and a wing-walking scene in which Eleanor Roosevelt's alleged lover, Lorena Hickok, bemoaned her paramour's flirtation with Amelia Earhart.

Hello Again is neither as delicious to the ear nor as consistently offbeat as First Lady Suite. At its best, in the above scenes and in a desperate encounter between a Senator and a streetwalker, it attains emotional clarity and sustained surprise. The structure -- A meets B, B meets C, and so on until the last character encounters A -- comes from Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde. In that piece, set in fin-de-siecle Vienna, sex crosses social lines, allowing commentary, and serves as a metaphor for syphilis, permitting preachment. LaChiusa resists the obvious AIDS allusion. His love connections are timeless, and hopeless. Yet consistently thwarting his characters does not impede the ribald, puckish entertainment.

The most exciting thing is not what LaChiusa is doing now, but what he may do next. In vision and pure nerve, he promises to rival William Finn of Falsettos -- if not Stephen Sondheim himself.