STAGE REVIEW : ‘WINDOW’ HAS CLARITY, MYSTERY

It is pointed out in “Blue Window” that words capture experience about as well as cupped hands carry water. This certainly applies to any attempted description of Craig Lucas’ play, which has transferred from South Coast Repertory to the New Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica. As at South Coast, the impulse is simply to give a chirp of pleasure and to get on the phone to one’s friends--the ones who think they’re too good for theater.

“Blue Window” shouldn’t be overburdened with lofty comparisons, but it has something of the clarity of a Mozart quintet. It’s light, but it also seems to shed light. It’s clear, but it suggests mysteries. And it’s faultlessly spun.

It is not set in Mozart’s time. The background music is by Cecil Taylor and somebody asks to turn it down. We’re at a small Sunday-night dinner party where the guests know the hostess (Lisa Pelikan) only slightly, and know each other hardly at all. They’re a little awkward with each other at first, but the strain doesn’t harden into conflict, as might happen in a more conventional play.

Rather like the tune that one of the guests (Tuck Milligan) is trying to work out at home on his guitar--which is why he doesn’t really want to be at the party--”Blue Window” doesn’t “go anywhere.” Yet, the viewer gets caught up in its changes. And by the end of the evening, seven lives have been revealed--and not condemned.

This last is particularly original. Plays and movies often use parties as set pieces to expose social-climbing, hypocrisy, greed and other sins. (Think of “Dinner at Eight” or “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”) “Blue Window” suggests that there’s something quite gallant about a party, with the hostess bravely plunging from one little disaster to the next (here a capped tooth that comes uncapped) and the guests sworn not to notice.

A good party takes faith . For instance, somebody has to stir up the conversation in the living room, even if it involves coming on like a brash guest on the Carson Show. Here it’s Jane Galloway as a young woman who is almost positive that she does family therapy for a living--but ask her again after she’s had another slug of this fantastically tacky punch. (In this milieu, “tacky” is a compliment.)

Equally well equipped with zingers is Barbara Tarbuck as Galloway’s significant-other, a novelist. Forget me , she will say--let’s talk about you . What did you think of my book? Ha, ha. Only kidding.

This is party patter, not serious egotism, and the conversation gets down to quite interesting speculations about life and language, periodically punctured by Brad O’Hare, who doesn’t read and is proud of it. We sense he’s defending the quietest member of the party, the guitar-player’s girlfriend (Susan Merson), who probably doesn’t read.

But, amazingly, Merson suddenly bursts into the very song that her lover is trying to finish. Not that anybody in the room can hear it. This is the most extreme example of “Blue Window’s” sense of mystery: a momentary cracking of the social ice to show the dark waters underneath it.

It isn’t that anybody in the room is on the brink of doing something drastic, except perhaps Pelikan as our hostess, for whom this party took courage indeed. (We find out about that when she and Chris Mulkey as her sky diving instructor clean up after the party.)

But there is a void within each of them, something like the dread felt when the sky diver takes his leap. Nobody is that secure about who he or she is, or about who this other person is, or about how long the relationship will last. As with Willy Loman, everybody’s feeling temporary about himself.

Lucas doesn’t belabor this undershadow, which he seems to find implicit in the human condition, not something remediable by a new arrangement of the social order. (A British playwright like David Hare would have made this a political play--Lucas’ characters seem to have no political interests at all.) But the undershadow gives the play substance and even tenderness. This is not just a comedy about people being clever at each other.

“Blue Window” suffers a bit in transferring to the Mayfair. One reason is that it’s a proscenium house, meaning that Cliff Faulkner’s superb set, with its blue-marbled floor, loses some of the effect it had in the thrust-stage setting at SCR. (Sit in the balcony, as I did, and the movement patterns of the play become clearer.)

Friday night, Norman Rene’s actors were still testing the acoustics of the house, not sure how intimate they could afford to be without losing projection. A few more performances will help with that; “Blue Window” deserves more than a few at its new address. Though a small play, it’s one of the fullest theater experiences of the year.

A tip: Don’t be thrown by the opening scene before the party. Though physically together on the stage, the characters are actually in their different apartments getting ready for the party. Note how beautifully their speeches fall into counterpoint. Mozart again.

‘BLUE WINDOW’

Craig Lucas’ play, staged by South Coast Repertory at the New Mayfair Theatre. Director Norman Rene. Set Cliff Faulkner. Costumes Shigeru Yagi. Lighting Paulie Jenkins. Sound Craig Carnelia. Stage manager R. Derek Swire. Presented by Herbert J. Kendall and Gerald Roberts. With Jane Galloway, Tuck Milligan, Chris Mulkey, Brad O’Hare, Lisa Pelikan, Barbara Tarbuck, Susan Merson. Plays Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8:30 p.m, Sundays at 7:30, with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:30. Tickets $12.50-$20. 214 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica. (213) 45l-0621.