Les Formidables

By RICHARD CORLISS

At the end of Charles Busch's campy 1985 hit Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, the two ageless, eponymous hags decide to take their act on the road. Tahoe, Chicago, Boston and then the glittering climax -- Broadway! Well, dears, that's one faded dream. The Great White Way still welcomes the big musicals, those theme parks with song cues, and a few dramas (usually developed elsewhere, often with subsidies). But it is now only one stop -- perhaps the biggest, and at $75 a top ticket surely the priciest -- on the world tour of hits. For original work, for vitality and glamour, more than ever, off- Broadway is the place to be.

The smaller theaters in New York City have long been home to droll souls like Busch, as well as to camp cabaret like the French import Les Incroyables (70 endless minutes of cross-dressing, lip-synching and canned cancan) and innocent party-time musicals like Nunsense 2: The Sequel (this time the good sisters of Mount Saint Helen's School play "Pin the Braid on Sinead").

Now off-Broadway is also attracting top stars and prestige playwrights. This month Vanessa Redgrave opens in Vita and Virginia and the Joseph Papp Public Theater premieres Sam Shepard's Simpatico. In December the Public has a new Hal Prince musical, The Petrified Prince. January brings a trio of one-acters by Woody Allen, David Mamet and Elaine May. Neil Simon, a Broadway pillar for a third of a century, made news recently when he said that mainstem plays had become too expensive to produce. Now even he is off-Broadway bound.

But why wait for these luminaries? Right now Manhattan playgoers will find this year's Pulitzer drama winner (Edward Albee's Three Tall Women) and a likely candidate for next year's prize (Terrence McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion!). Walk down 42nd Street to find the wittiest evening in town (David Ives' All in the Timing). And if you wonder what Kenneth Branagh does when he's not doing everything else, check out the U.S. premiere of his 1987 play Public Enemy.

Household names on the marquee do not, of course, guarantee dramatic splendor inside. The Branagh play is a trifle that searches for nightmare poetry in "plain old American-Irish English" and for political significance in the story of a Belfast punk (Paul Ronan) obsessed by the grit and grace of Jimmy Cagney. It finds none of the above, lost as it is in a muddle of moralizing and attitudinizing. But it shares a potent theme with the season's cannier off-Broadway ventures: that star worship is a virus, carried by the popular media and infecting anyone who has a little talent and big gaudy dreams. The difference is that, in many other shows, the Warner Bros. star whom the hero might dream of being is not Cagney but Bette Davis, patron saint of bitchery, proto-queen of camp.

Off-Broadway has long been the Gay White Way. When Broadway, in the postwar era of Tennessee Williams, William Inge and Edward Albee, addressed homosexual themes, it did so in the metaphorical closet. The modern gay writer can address his dreams and demons directly; and in the aids plague, he has a suitable subject for domestic tragedy. Today the gay sensibility -- acerb, lusty, nostalgic, poignant -- dominates high drama and low comedy.

Sometimes the two forms blend, as in the Ridiculous Theatrical Company's orgasmically garish version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Fifteen gaily bedight actors (including Ridiculous impresario Everett Quinton) crowd the wee stage. They trumpet Shakespeare's lines and strumpet up his play until it resembles an all-night Greenwich Village loft party. The rtc was founded by the late Charles Ludlam, a great clown whose spirit still haunts the place and inspires its denizens.

Ludlam's more commercial successor is Busch, the actor-writer whose drag comedies (The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset) have the old-fashioned Broadway virtues of craftsmanship, verve and sentimentality. In You Should Be So Lucky, Busch meets Broadway more than halfway: he tosses half a dozen kooky but recognizable types into a Manhattan apartment for some brisk chat and jettisons his familiar gingham-taffeta dress and rhinestone-drop earrings for a Chinese robe. He plays Christopher, a shy electrologist who isn't really "deep," he explains. "It's just that my superficiality is rather complex." And that's the neat trick of his show, which plays catch with sexual identity, ethnic roots and the burden of instant media fame. Busch should be so lucky to carry it. Since off-Broadway is the hot spot now, maybe he will be.

The mission of George C. Wolfe, the Tony-winning director who has become the Public Theater's boss, is to bring theatrical heat back to that institution, languishing since Papp's death three years ago. In his first season, Wolfe filled part of the gap with one-person shows. Two ornament his stages now: Jenifer Lewis' semiautobiographical The Diva Is Dismissed and Danny Hoch's street-cornery Some People. As Anna Deavere Smith has shown, a solo turn can have epic echoes. But the Greeks were on to something when, 2,500 years ago, they brought a second performer onstage; that changed the product from incantation to drama.

As director of Oliver Mayer's Blade to the Heat, Wolfe takes a stilted boxing story (loosely based on the 1962 ring death of Benny Paret) and infuses it with dizzying showmanship. He has put in R. and B. songs and all kinds of nifty footwork. He filches smartly from Raging Bull and Dreamgirls; this show has more choreography, in its simulated bouts and in the sexy way people move, than most Broadway musicals do. The subject -- the spur of machismo and the taint of homosexuality in contact sports -- has room for profundity, and some of the actors (notably Nelson Vasquez as a fighter high on venom) are excellent. But beneath the satin robe of stagecraft is only the skeleton of a play, gaunt, clunky and long past its prime.

There's plenty of music in McNally's play: in the sonata form of the play's three acts, in the songs that open or close them, in the Chopin played offstage, and in the allusions that one character, Buzz, makes to old Broadway shows -- but mostly in the lyric, comic grace of the dialogue and in the taut drama of the midnight silences, when men sleep in each other's arms or go on a hopeful prowl for another body to touch. Most of these gay men, spending three holiday weekends in an upstate New York house, have achieved middle age. That means survival, for the moment (aids anxiety lurks like the Ancient Mariner in McNally's recent work), as well as a weary, wise accommodation to monogamy and maturity, stiff joints and dashed hopes.

Love! Valour! Compassion! -- the title comes from John Cheever, another poet of midlife regret -- is a very funny play that recognizes the desperation in so much gay humor. Buzz (Nathan Lane) is a geyser of inverted anger; he has a wild edge to his wit because he is dying, faster than the rest of us. And in his kinship with the sainted James (John Glover), Buzz finds a human focus for his devotional energy. To be loved is lovely, but to love is to live.

After three decades of writing, McNally has achieved so fluid a mastery that he can open the play with a subtle tour de force: the men describe their friends while slipping in and out of the action; they are both narrators and players, actors and audience. He doesn't need them to be heroes and villains (well, one villain, a bit too violently sketched); he needn't resort to melodrama to find a wrenching climax. In concert with director Joe Mantello and a faultless ensemble, McNally has created a celebration -- of manhood, friendship, making do, soldiering on. If you're looking to celebrate the vibrant life of off-Broadway, start right here.