BROADWAY GROWS UP

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

There are seasons within every Broadway season--fleeting intervals when the wind shifts, the atmosphere changes. But these days, as doomsayers are seeing ever darker clouds in Broadway's future, the weather is not all that it's supposed to be.

It's as if inscrutable forces have been working to upend our generalizations. Has Broadway been overrun by high-tech, low-heart monster musicals? This year the embarrassing problem confronting the Tony Award givers is that the season's monster, Sunset Blvd., is one of just two new musicals to have opened--and the only one with new music. As a result, the Tony administrators have given their nominating committee the option of simply awarding the Tony summarily to Sunset in the categories--Best Original Score and Best Musical Book--where it has no competition.

Is Broadway most hospitable to Neil Simon's brand of amiable but unthreatening comedies? Simon does have a new show this spring, a series of four one-acts called London Suite, and in many ways it's a characteristic product: well proportioned and comfortably predictable. But in protest against Broadway's huge costs, he has taken his work downtown. For the first time, a new Neil Simon show has opened off-Broadway.

Meanwhile, running in the teeth of every stereotype, Broadway has embraced subtle, intellectually challenging theater. In the past three months we've had a pair of Moliere one-act comedies (the delicate weights and balances of their rhymed couplets judiciously meted out by the show's star, Brian Bedford) and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Brian Friel's Translations, which closed two weeks ago, offered the cheeringly unlikely sight of a handsome Broadway production about an impoverished Latin instructor in rural 19th century Ireland. If the play suffered from casting problems (and some bilious reviews), its nobility of intent shone clear: here was a drama about the potency and mystery of language.

Language likewise is at the center of Tom Stoppard's brilliant Arcadia--along with the evolution of the English garden, Fermat's Last Theorem and the perils of biography. And the next few weeks will deliver Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country, Jean Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles (retitled Indiscretions) and Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo. All that and a new Hamlet too, starring Ralph Fiennes.

Perhaps nothing encapsulates Broadway's unexpected season better than The Heiress. The play, whose run has been extended because of surprisingly good business, is based on Henry James' novel Washington Square. Disaster might plausibly have been foreseen for this chatty drawing-room drama, whose sexiest moment involves a kiss and whose most violent act is the barring of a door. But over the years, James' tale of chaste spinsterhood has given birth to a number of robust offspring. The present production might be called a pair of revivals: of the 1947 Broadway play written by Ruth and Augustus Goetz and also (at least in atmosphere) of the wonderful Hollywood film, starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift, spun from it two years later.

If the current production opens stiffly (as though conversation had to be slower in the 19th century because contractions hadn't yet been invented), the actors soon zero in on their thrillingly cold target. As is often true in James, we witness a battle that can have no victors. Dr. Austin Sloper (Philip Bosco) is a wealthy widower whose earnest daughter Catherine (Cherry Jones) pales beside his resplendent memories of his wife (who, to make the comparison all the more pointed and painful, died giving birth to Catherine). Reared in an atmosphere of genteel censure, Catherine only gradually surmises that "no one has ever loved me in my life." When love surprisingly appears--or its slick semblance, in the form of a fortune hunter (Jon Tenney)--she comes to realize that if there is a choice between two forms of counterfeit affection, a cash-based passion may be superior to a condescending paternalism. The Heiress is a play of bleak and haunting subtleties.

It would be easy to make too much of Broadway's new braininess. Any season responsible for coaxing Jerry Lewis into his first Broadway appearance (as the devil in Damn Yankees) will hardly go down in history as unstintingly cerebral. What's more, many of these serious dramas are (as usual) British imports, in whole or part. Even so, at a time when many playgoers have lost faith in mainstream theater's ability to satisfy serious tastes, the change in the wind is heartening. Pick a night. It's a good time to be sailing for Broadway.