. . . BUT NOW THE GOOD NEWS IS . . .

“The play’s the thing,” Hamlet once told us, wherein he’d catch the conscience of the king.

More recently, it’s seemed, the play’s the thing wherein the movies might catch their own lost conscience: get back some of the intelligence, emotional honesty and adulthood they’ve been missing through most of the ‘80s. Over the past several months, there’s been a minor theatrical invasion: a flurry of play-into-film adaptations. It began with “About Last Night . . .” (taken from David Mamet’s “Sexual Perversity in Chicago”), and it’s continued with films based on Mark Medoff’s “Children of a Lesser God,” Marsha Norman’s “ ‘night, Mother,” William Mastrosimone’s “Extremities,” Nell Dunn’s “Steaming” and, coming later this year, Tom Kempinski’s “Duet for One.”

It may not be a real trend (not on a par with “Police Academy” clones), but it’s a phenomenon with one bright side. Suddenly, serious American movie actors have some roles again: parts they can sink their teeth into, characters with a little heart and guts, mind and spirit. It’s not impossible that five of the movies listed above--minus the long-shelved British “Steaming”--will account for as many as 5 to 10 of next year’s Oscar nominations in the acting categories. That, in itself, isn’t enough to make these movies great--most of them aren’t--but it’s an encouraging sign. And, given current conditions, it’s one that today’s American film actors really need.

Most play-movies are made, in the first place, because of the actors. They happen when a Sissy Spacek (“ ‘night, Mother”) or a Rob Lowe and Demi Moore (“About Last Night . . .”) really want to do them--sometimes at a salary below what they’d normally command. Why? You can’t discount status (or Oscar) seeking as a motive--but, most likely, it’s because they’re starved for something good and tired of the scripts they usually get. Faced with another batch of vendetta sagas, slasher thrillers or infantile sex farces, who could blame them?

American films in the past decade have had scandalously few well-written dramatic scripts, few characters that could present any kind of challenge to a serious actor. The texts of American plays, however--particularly plays that have won awards or acclaim--are more delicately handled when they become film projects. They may be changed, even changed considerably, but chances are they won’t be annihilated. Someone like William Hurt would be foolish not to get involved in a movie like “Children of a Lesser God.” How many roles like that is he going to be able to wangle while he’s still at the early ripe peak of his bankability and craft?

Yet, there’s an irony. American theater is also an industry--like Hollywood--with a bizarre economy and dissolving borders. (Most of the American works above originated not on Broadway, but in regional theater.) The new plays now being filmed usually feature small casts--four, three, or even, as in “ ‘night, Mother,” only two--and severely limited backgrounds: a living room, a kitchen. They do this from necessity: With serious plays, you need to keep the casts small and the costs down.

Their strategies are mostly set by Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”: a handful of people in close quarters and intense confrontation. This creates interesting problems for a film director. Never mind the problems of cinematic form: How do you keep an audience’s mind on emotional issues and undercurrents when they’ve been drowned everywhere else in zap, rapes and massacres? (Sometimes the solution is to give them rapes, in “Extremities,” and zap, in “About Last Night. . . .” Massacres are dicier.)

The adaptations above mostly try to keep the essence of the original play (except for “About Last Night . . .,” which twists it around completely). But they’re variably faithful to the texts. “ ‘night, Mother” and “Steaming” hew most closely to the lines and enclosed settings--in the former, the rural home of the suicidal daughter; in the latter, the shabby old East End Turkish bath house. “Extremities” adds another rape (in a parking lot, with the same characters) at the beginning.

The changes in “Children of a Lesser God” are more pronounced: a political subplot removed, a softer ending. And “Duet for One” and “About Last Night . . .” have had the most energetic “opening up.” “Duet for One” now shows us events--in the life of a concert violinist stricken with multiple sclerosis--that, in the play, she discussed onstage with her psychiatrist. “About Last Night . . .” switches the whole shape and thrust of Mamet’s scathing, mordant, dead-on satire of the singles scene and American sexual mores. Director Edward Zwick and his adapters have fashioned, smoothly and entertainingly, something different: a brisk, warm, funny “feel-good” movie with yuppie love triumphant. (Even the play’s amusing monster, Bernard--originated on stage by F. Murray Abraham--becomes, in the movie, Lovable Litko, one boisterous big-mouthed hell of a guy. Even with the changes, Jim Belushi’s performance is the movie’s--and one of the year’s--best.)

How good are these new play-movies . . . as movies? Are they really the way out of the ‘80s teen sex/macho man/endless-sequel wilderness? Or were they fatally compromised to begin with?

Overall, I’d put “Children of a Lesser God” and “Duet for One” on the top level (the first slightly higher); “About Last Night . . .” just beneath them and “Extremities” and “ ‘night, Mother” just below. (Not because I don’t respect their attempt or achievement--or the fine work of their casts--but, because, at crucial points, I can’t swallow them: “ ‘night, Mother” because of the casting and directorial approach, “Extremities” because of its weird quasi-polemical pay-off scenes.)

Unlike Dan Sullivan, I don’t think Randa Haines’ movie of “Children of a Lesser God” is less intelligent than Medoff’s script because it eliminates the political combats at the play’s close and opts for a happy ending--or because it winds up, finally, as a classical old-fashioned movie romance. The movie fudges some of the play’s power, but it gives you many things the play couldn’t: a greater sense of the community and the milieu, more wit and high spirits, more of the wind and the cool, the water and the world outside. Images and emotions can be as profound as words and happy endings are not necessarily dumber or more compromised than unhappy ones--though Medoff’s unhappy one was really withering. Nor do they necessarily blunt a story’s points. On its own level, as a movie romance, “Children” works fine--and Haines is surely one of the directorial finds of the year.

But my favorite of the six is the one that has probably received, overall, the worst reviews of the lot: Joseph Losey’s film of Nell Dunn’s “Steaming,” perhaps for its sentimentality: It was Losey’s last film, his return to English-language movies after years in France and one he never lived to see released in America, his native country.

Perhaps for its stubbornness: Losey has made so many great movies--many of them originally received as badly as this one--that the attacks seem cruel and hasty. Maybe its simple voyeurism: As with the original stage version, an undeniable part of the appeal here (for a segment of the audience) is the old fantasy of a secret view into the other shower room.

But maybe it’s because the play has a really stimulating directorial overview. Losey’s model and lifelong influence was Bertolt Brecht, with whom he worked on the original Los Angeles production of “Galileo.” In “Steaming,” he’s obviously trying to realize Brecht’s ideal: to make us think critically, at every point, about what we’re watching.

“Steaming” makes us ponder the points Nell Dunn wants to make--about the treatment of women, the ghettoization of social classes, the levels at which people can meet, join and communicate. And, at the same time, it presents a theatrically beautiful spectacle: the dull greens of the bathhouse, the Grecian severity of the groupings, the mist rising from the water--all those cooly lovely, restrained images: breathing at first with resignation, then with hope. . . .

In “Steaming” and “Children of a Lesser God,” you sense as much a directorial vision as a playwright’s. In the end, that’s a lot of what makes them unique and memorable as movies. Because, as movies, they should communicate as much by the director’s touch--image, emotion and rhythm--as the stage plays do by words and the intensity of the actors.

Still, I suspect, at bottom, that the reason Sullivan feels more dyspeptic about some of these films than I do is that he never, in the course of his duties as theater critic, has to wander into “Hardbodies 2,” “Vasectomy,” “Weekend Warriors,” “Howard the Duck,” “Cobra,” “Barbarian Queen,” “Loose Screws” or “Hamburger: The Movie.” Maybe he even gets to miss the movies that fool you into expecting something, like “Heartburn.” He’s lucky.