‘BLUE WINDOW’--THROUGH A GLASS, LIGHTLY

Of the several shows worth seeing in town just now, “Foxfire” at the Ahmanson has the Cronyns going for it; “Glengarry Glen Ross” at the Fonda has a Pulitzer Prize going for it; “Tracers” at the Coronet has the Vietnam War going for it; “The Gospel at Colonus” at the Doolittle has the tradition of gospel music going for it; and “Blue Window” at the New Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica (once the Mayfair Music Hall) has nothing going for it, other than the fact that it’s a remarkable play. So let’s talk about “Blue Window.”

Except for one actor, this is the same production that played to sold-out houses at South Coast Repertory earlier this fall. Last year SCR brought another remarkable play, “Top Girls” to the Westwood Playhouse, where it lasted about two weeks. If that happens to “Blue Window,” people are going to start saying that Orange County audiences have a finer eye for theater than Los Angeles audiences.

Not that anyone should go to see “Blue Window” out of cultural duty. It is as lightly-turned a show as “Top Girls” was, or, before that, “Cloud Nine.” And it is just as hard to label. It wouldn’t be wrong to call Craig Lucas’ play a comedy. Its characters say amusing things (generally on purpose, which breaks a rule in comedy) and its ending is hopeful. But underneath the laughter, there’s a melancholy.

Perhaps melancholy is too strong. Do you know the little ache on Sunday night, when there’s nothing to look forward to but Monday morning? That feeling. Somebody in “Blue Window” associates it with watching “The Ed Sullivan Show” as a kid, and everybody agrees that he’s put his finger on it.

There are seven people in the play: four women, three men. Each now lives in the very city where “The Ed Sullivan Show” came from, and each seems to have her or his act together, whether it’s family therapy (Jane Galloway) or sky-diving (Chris Mulkey). Moreover, four of the seven are involved in “relationships”--Galloway with her roommate, Barbara Tarbuck; Tuck Milligan with his roommate, Susan Merson.

These people are fairly secure about themselves, but the Sunday-night blues can get anyone down, so they are happy to accept a certain Libby’s invitation to dinner, even though they don’t know her all that well. On her part, Libby (Lisa Pelikan) isn’t exactly dying to have them over. In fact, she dreads it. This is the first entertaining she’s done in four years.

Why? We find out at the end of the play. But “Blue Window” isn’t the kind of play where everything hinges on the revelation of a big secret. In fact, I suspect that Libby’s confession--touching as it is--could probably be cut without fatal damage to the play. It would be enough to leave the theater realizing that the party was a crucial test for her, and that she got through it.

Still, it’s easy to understand Lucas’ desire to provide the audience some kind of payoff, for “Blue Window” is deliberately low on two ingredients still considered fundamental in good play making: conflict and suspense. The big conflict in this play is whether to turn down the background music. The big suspense is whether Libby will ever get dinner on. And neither issue comes to a head.

One can imagine what would happen to Libby’s dinner party if a mischief-maker like Alan Ayckbourn were drawing it--the broken punch bowl, the guys slugging it out in the hall, Libby in hysterics. But that’s not Lucas’ game at all. He lets Libby have a successful party--a bit tense at first, but quite pleasant once people start talking to each other. (Galloway takes the initiative, coming on a little more brassily than she probably would at home.) The Sunday-night blues don’t strike until everybody goes home.

How can an OK party make a marvelous play? For one thing, we don’t see just the party. In the first scene, we spy on Libby and her guests as they’re getting ready for the party. (Brad O’Hare is particularly winning as Libby’s friend Griever, auditioning his various shirts before a mirror and finding them all wanting.) In the last scene, we spy on them as they review it.

“I wonder what Libby’s story is?” Galloway says to Tarbuck, which gets them into a carefully delimited fight. (An earlier Lucas play at South Coast Repertory was entitled “Reckless,” but “Blue Window’s” people tend to be prudent.) Meanwhile, back in his apartment, Milligan, a musician, finishes the song that’s been nagging at him all day, while his shy girlfriend, Merson, pursues her habit of watching TV with the sound off.

Finally, we hear Libby’s story, as she tells it to her nice sky-diving instructor, Mulkey, who stayed behind to help with the dishes. When Griever calls to assure Libby that everybody had a great time, he gets the picture right away. Poor Griever. He did have some hopes.

This is small stuff, but it’s true stuff. Lucas has the playwright’s gift of listening to people and of not trying to make them say more than they actually would say--their silences will reveal what they’re thinking. In other words, everything in “Blue Window” starts with behavior. That’s why its usualness isn’t boring. We feel that we’re eavesdropping on people, and moreover on people that we like (we certainly like Norman Rene’s actors). This is much more interesting than being trapped in a dramatized thesis.

Yet for all its truth, “Blue Window” is also an artifice, a theatrical game. For convenience, I’ve described the after-the-party as if it happened in sequence. Actually, it all happens simultaneously. As in a film, the play cuts back and forth from one apartment to the other. But without bringing the lights down and without trying to subdivide Cliff Faulkner’s superbly spare setting. The eye sees seven actors in a well-lighted space, close enough to touch. The mind’s eye reads them as being scattered all over the city.

Lucas uses the same technique in the getting-ready-for-the-party scene. This puzzled some opening-night viewers at the Mayfair so much that they never did get back on the trail. (Nobody complained at SCR.) The solution is simply to relax and let the mind follow whatever seems to be the leading voice. Lucas has scored the scene very carefully, and the relaxed listener will get the gist of it, while the alert listener will enjoy tracking the separate voices.

The party itself plays with tape-recorder accuracy, barring a magical moment where the quiet Merson goes into some corner of her mind and bursts into song. It is the very song that her self-absorbed lover has been trying to work out on his guitar. Has she simply come up with her own set of lyrics? Perhaps, but the effect is more mysterious than that, almost as if she’d gone into the future and come back with the song.

“Blue Window” has this way of turning the kaleidoscope, so that its pieces suddenly make up a new design--another reason we don’t get sick of its party talk. Still another reason is that, as party talk, it’s pretty sharp. Not profound (who wants that at a party?), but intelligent and amusing, in a nicely un-bitchy way. A European would despair at these people’s utter lack of interest in politics, as opposed to psychology and the plays of Eugene O’Neill; but that’s the times.

And perhaps Libby’s memory of a certain railing giving way is a political image at that. “Blue Window” leaves a lot under the surface, stuff that’s there but that the viewer can’t quite articulate and doesn’t really want to, any more than he would feel the need to footnote the effect of an unexpected minor chord in a piece of music that started out to be blithe.

For instance, there’s something rather poignant in the silent preparations for the party. How alone Griever is with his shirts, and Libby is with her blender! If self-obsession is the natural state of man, then there’s something rather heroic in his attempt to join other men and woman around the fire, if only for a couple of hours.

Perhaps Libby’s dinner party isn’t therapy just for Libby. Perhaps the malaise it combats is more basic than the Sunday night blues. But “Blue Window” doesn’t get heavy about these things. It is content to be a little play--a wind chime, perfectly tuned. Those who like their theater to be on the nose may find it a bit too elusive. Those who like to read between the lines will find it their kind of play.