N.Y. STAGE REVIEWS : UNCOMMON ‘PURSUIT’ OF LITERACY

The most uncommon aspect of Simon Gray’s extraordinary play “The Common Pursuit” is its unabashed, faintly anachronistic pursuit of literacy. We are so bombarded by electronic images and so mired in monosyllabic exchanges that the power that springs from a play steeped in intelligence and real language becomes thoroughly intoxicating.

And that’s just one of “The Common Pursuit’s” many virtues. How about discernible structure? Wit? And interesting relationships--not only between lovers, but between friend and friend?

These are at the heart of what is Gray’s most human, fascinating and subtle play to date: an excoriating, funny yet moving account of a group of university chums engaged in putting out a literary magazine, and whose lives, over a 20-year period, remain inextricably connected.

The edition of the play currently enjoying acclaim at Off-Broadway’s Promenade Theatre was 90% realized during a six-week residency at Los Angeles’ Matrix Theatre last winter. In New York, Gray (assisted by Michael Maguire) has replaced the original director, Sam Weisman, but has not so much changed the Matrix/Weisman staging as slightly rearranged it.

Case in point: He has truncated the opening scene, now making its original second half a coda to the play. This, like more minor adjustments perceivable throughout, has merely strengthened and refined what was already heady drama.

Three members of the Los Angeles company have continued in their roles (Kristoffer) Tabori, Judy Geeson, Dylan Baker), three others are new (Michael Countryman, Peter Friedman, Nathan Lane). All are excellent. And designer David Jenkins’ different series of “rooms” are just abstracted enough to take us out of a humdrum field of reality while still serving the play well.

The academic world and its baroque reverberations are a favorite context of Gray’s, here as much as in his other plays such as “Butley,” “Otherwise Engaged” and “Quartermaine’s Terms.” But he has rarely before achieved the sharpness and complexity that he gives us in “The Common Pursuit.”

It is a small diamond of a play, whose various characters are its facets and absorb one another’s light only to more brilliantly--and humanly--reflect it.

Everything that is right with “The Common Pursuit”--its pertinence and focus--is wrong with the new Marvin Hamlisch/Howard Ashman musical at the Lunt-Fontanne. Everything wrong with Broadway today, in fact, can be summarized in one word: “Smile.”

This bland, vacant show, with its chilling top ticket price of $47.50, is a dinosaur: a lumbering, directionless musical about the absurdity of beauty contests, locked in an identity crisis of major proportions.

Originally meant as a stage spoof of a movie spoof (not in itself a bad idea) of such curious tribal practices as the Miss America Pageant, it hopelessly loses its way, forgets to satirize or resolve key points, becoming the very thing it most wanted to put down--a silly, smug, morally muddled show, suffering from a dereliction of good sense and dramaturgy.

At least one hopes that’s what went wrong. Anything else is unthinkable. That such creditable talents as Hamlisch (music) and Ashman (book, lyrics and direction) have perpetrated this blunder only deepens its mystery.

Down in the Village, where the air and the thinking are clearer, Charles Ludlam continues undeterred to do his thing as playwright-in-residence, artistic director, performer and principal jack-of-all-trades of his Ridiculous Theatrical Company.

He has opened in yet another of his original, lurid, silly and wonderful penny dreadfuls, “The Artificial Jungle,” that for all of its playfulness doesn’t quite measure up to the hilarity and bravura of such Ludlam extravaganzas as “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” “Camille” or “Galas.”

Aside from being a weaker play, “Jungle” simply demands too little outrageousness of Ludlam, the outre performer par excellence. Not unlike the glo-paint piranhas in the “Jungle’s” fish tank (you have to see it to believe it), we are left hungering for more.

The downtown Public Theatre, on the other hand, is exulting in George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum,” a series of comic vignettes on black life and attitudes in America that is a very hot ticket and has been hailed as a first black effort at self-parody.

“First” is an irrelevant word here; “good” is a better one. As a Pomona College student 10 years ago, Wolfe was already trying his hand at satire. Later he did trench work as a playwright at Los Angeles’ Inner City Cultural Center.

He is still a very young artist and a certain rawness of approach persists in his “Colored Museum.” It is uneven, a little too self-satisfied, loud and unvarnished, but it’s alive and the promise continues.

We enter this “Museum” by way of a journey on the Celebrity Slave Ship, where shackles replace seat belts and earphones can be purchased for the price of your first-born male. Once in the New World, Wolfe’s not afraid to take on a number of other icons: frizzy hair, the more sentimental aspects of “For Colored Girls . . . ,” what he calls “Mama-on-the-couch” plays and Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” (“He comes from another oppressed people,” quips Wolfe, “so he understands.”)

The dark side of this self-mockery is never far under the surface, and once in a while Wolfe reminds us that it’s there--as in “LaLa’s Opening,” or the effect of celebrity on white terms in America. “Being black is emotionally taxing, so I’ll be black only on weekends and holidays” is not as funny as it sounds. But when Wolfe says that “God created black people and black people created style,” we know that one of them at least is on his way to proving he’s got plenty of it.