N.Y. STAGE REVIEWS : UPTOWN OR DOWNTOWN, PLAY’S STILL THE THING

Broadway is for shows; Off Broadway is for plays. The most important ones this winter are Sam Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind,” playing uptown at the Promenade Theater, and Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” playing downtown at the Public.

Despite the title, Shepard’s play (directed by him as well) doesn’t have a lot to do with the mind, at least the thinking part. Shepard writes about instinct: why we couple, why we kill, why we start families, why we desert our families.

Jake (Harvey Keitel) loves Beth (Amanda Plummer) so desperately that it’s natural for him to clobber her when he sees that she’s getting interested in another guy. (She doesn’t realize that she is, but she is.)

Similarly, it’s natural that Beth’s brother Mike (Will Patton) should take up his rifle and go out stalking Jake for having punched his sister into the hospital. Not only will this avenge the family honor, it will impress Daddy, who lives to hunt (James Gammon).

And it’s natural that Jake’s widowed Mama (Georgine Hall, substituting for Geraldine Page) should be delighted to have him back under her roof, so as to rekindle the family romance and the family battle. (Eventually it’s the house that gets kindled.)

Luckily, Jake has a peaceable brother, Frankie (Aidan Quinn), and through him a kind of calm is restored at the end of the play. Frankie comes off as a bit of a wimp, though. Shepard’s heart seems to be out in the woods, with Mike and Jake, brutes though they are.

“A Lie of the Mind” is a summation of everything that Shepard has had to say about the battle of nature and nurture, particularly the tension when men and women (“two opposite animals” as somebody observes) try to find common ground. Its best scenes have the shaggy-dog quality that Shepard manages so well and through which we see so much that’s absolutely true about America, still an untamed country .

But the play runs four hours, which is at least one hour too many. Shepard didn’t need a director to help him get his play on the stage--it looks fine--but he could have used a director to suggest that this or that scene had already made its point. He has been a lean writer; here we see fat. “A Lie of the Mind” is all there, but it needs to be focused.

In contrast, Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” could use amplification. This is the scandal of the New York season, in that it appears to argue that the Nazis, while brutes, were at least honest brutes--and, in our own little way, aren’t we just as as brutal when it comes to defending our way of life?

That Lemon, the young woman making the argument (Kathryn Pogson), is thin to the point of anorexia; that her spiritual mentor, Aunt Dan (Linda Hunt), is seen as a psychological child-abuser; that the argument itself has no logic to it--these are true, but somehow don’t take the curse off of hearing these words voiced without opposition from a public stage.

As if feeling a bit odd about this himself, Shawn added an eight-page “afterword” in the newly published edition of the play. It explains that what he’s trying to get at here is the carelessness of public argumentation these days, the need for more rigor lest we be suckered in, like Lemon, to the notions of such brilliant obsessives as Aunt Dan. (Hunt is indeed brilliant: a gnome-like Fairy Godmother pouring the sleaziest stuff into a little girl’s ear as merrily as if they were contemporaries.)

Shawn also writes about how potent the slightest word spoken in real life can be, in that all human beings are hooked into the same mental network. Doesn’t that apply to words spoken in the theater too? It would be interesting to see Shawn’s postscript performed as a part of “Aunt Dan,” to help the audience locate the play a bit more precisely than they do at the Public Theatre, where they don’t seem sure whether to boo it, argue with it or what.

They are goaded by it, that’s for sure. The production, by Max Stafford-Clark, is as acid and as cool as one of Lemon’s strange vegetable tonics, and the effect lingers a long time--much longer than that of “A Lie of the Mind.” In both cases, though, we are given something to ponder. That’s the difference between a show and a play.