Lighting Up Broadway

By RICHARD CORLISS

Broadway--who needs it? It's a mausoleum for foreigners and fogies. It's got no stars, no premier playwrights, no float-out-of-the-theater magic. Some days that may be true. But last Monday a few dozen eminences from movies, TV and even the stage convened at the Broadhurst Theatre for a little old-fashioned dazzle. The occasion was a benefit called "The Playwright's the Thing," an evening of skits and play excerpts by three superb American comic dramatists: Christopher Durang, Terrence McNally and Wendy Wasserstein. The event, of which TIME was the presenting sponsor, raised money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, a charity that helps theater people with AIDS. The evening also raised the spirits of everyone lucky enough to be there.

Stars? They were lined up in the Broadhurst's wings like a queue for The Phantom Menace. Steve Martin played a nasty shrink to Stockard Channing's frazzled patient. Nathan Lane and Swoosie Kurtz as two actors waiting for an opening-night review ran their fingernails under each other's egos. Betty Buckley as a modern-media Medea got lectured by a toughlove angel (Whoopi Goldberg). Stunning Susan Sarandon was a fretful Southern mama trying to marry off her shy, sly son (delicious David Hyde Pierce), who had eyes only for his glass menagerie of cocktail swizzle sticks.

Some of the sketches reminded the faithful why they were there: to fight the loss and loneliness that attend AIDS and other human calamities. A woman (Elizabeth Franz) whose son had died in a car accident was comforted by the beautiful singing of the woman (Audra McDonald) whose car had hit him. Two G.I.'s (Brian Dennehy and George Wendt) play a game of Botticelli while waiting for, and then gunning down, a lone enemy soldier. At the funeral for a young man dead of AIDS, his lover (Tim Robbins) tries to reach out to the dead man's mother (Zoe Caldwell), stranded in grief and anger.

The arts have no shortage of fund-raising schemes; in a McNally skit not performed last week, a harried patroness dashes off to a Disabled Modern Dancers' Luncheon. But giving needn't be an ordeal. "The Playwright's the Thing" proved that when Broadway has a good cause, it can have a great effect. And it can inspire as it entertains. In the evening's most indelible turn, Debra Monk played a New Yorker crisscrossing the border of reason and madness. She takes comfort in the poet Thomas Gray's line: "laughing wild amidst severest woe." For those in the audience with AIDS or other diseases that have ravaged our world, the phrase not only defined this hilarious, touching evening and the canny dramatic strategy of its playwriting trio. They were words to live by--a blueprint for the theater's survival, and ours.

--By Richard Corliss