BROADWAY BOUND: N.Y. AS AN ALTERNATE HABITAT

Today’s New York generally has a way to go for me. The cabs have an inconvenient habit of falling into potholes and when you complain about this to New Yorkers, they ask with only mild interest, which pothole, because, you see, they are all cross-indexed and numbered and no doubt, named, and by the time I go there next time, there’ll be Guided Tours to the Greater (and Lesser) Potholes of Manhattan.

You can’t live there unless you are splendiferously rich and occupy whole floors or an entire loft or unless you are young and headstrong and impetuous and don’t know the difference, and I am not any of the above.

And yet . . . and yet. It’s the city of my birth, and a serious amount of nurturing. And so when the National Society of Film Critics gathers at the sacred and utterly unchanged Algonquin Hotel to hold its annual voting, I feel a tug a little beyond duty that pulls me back.

And how does New York seem, as it enters a brand-new year? More thuggish than usual in Times Square. Riot-ridden and ominous out in Queens, where the horrendous Howard’s Beach incident dominated the news and most conversations.

But the city’s poets were in splendid voice. More than 50 of its finest gathered at the annual benefit for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church New Year’s Day, reading from after dusk until after midnight. Light snow and rain outside, the smell of wet wool indoors, the old wooden church crammed with lovers--of poetry, of the new year, of one another. There were poems in praise of practically everything, from a well-placed shot from the free-throw line to the overflowing bounty of Woolworth’s.

New York’s actors were in fine voice too. It was interesting to catch a group of young movie-and-theater actors, Matthew Broderick, Hallie Foote, Jonathan Silverman in their alternate habitats; to see them work in a long, sustained line, to understand their strengths, their very different qualities under the lights of a theater.

Tell a New Yorker you’re going to see “Broadway Bound” and brace yourself for a certain amount of rolled eyes and faint condescension. Neil Simon! Isn’t that just like the Coast? Well, with no defensiveness at all, I can say that “Broadway Bound” is a moving evening in the theater. It’s particularly fascinating because, although they concern the same people only 10 years later, “Broadway Bound” is light-years better than “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” Especially the movie of “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

Simon seems to have made enormous leaps with “Broadway Bound.” He has given up some of his patented rhythms and gags for a deeper tone, and to have bestowed the gains on every single character. If Linda Lavin’s performance as the mother has a lingering radiance, it’s possibly because the author seems to be setting his own house in order and his relationship with his mother in particular.

Jonathan Silverman, as Simon’s alter ego, is a quite different actor to watch in the theater. The best thing you could say about him in the film was that, somehow and against considerable odds, he made Eugene’s randy adolescence bearable. He does a great deal more now--Silverman has gone from likable to interesting, and beyond: to an actor whose maturing work you look forward to.

Over at the Circle in the Square, Hallie Foote is in “The Widow Claire,” the third of a 9-play cycle about her own antecedents, written by her father, Horton Foote. With her is Matthew Broderick, playing Horace Rodedaux at 21, in 1911. I am not going to get into the time sequence of these plays, which are moving backwards from “1917” and beginning to confuse me unutterably.

What is perfectly clear is that Hallie Foote, perfect as the semi-flirtatious Claire, has, after two films and this play, now begun to seem entirely a creature of the early 1900s. It’s as much of a shock to see her offstage in her own clothes as it would be to spot Isadora Duncan in jeans and a T-shirt.

What those unlucky enough to know Matthew Broderick only from films may not know is his luminescence on a stage. It’s almost unearthly: a strength that seems to come from a quiet, pure concentration, an absolute minimum of extraneous movement, and his own, pale coloring and dark eyes. It’s something that film has only been able to hint at so far, even in his better roles, like “Ladyhawke.”

Most interesting of all were the leaps each of these young actors have made on the stage--even in a period called one of the worst in theater history. Each of them has facets that films haven’t yet seen: the young men have an added depth and maturity; Foote has a quick, playful quality that we might not have known about from her film roles.

I heard one nice, true Broadway story. It concerned the cast and crew of the ill-fated “Frankenstein,” which had gone through extensive out-of-town tryouts, only to crash and burn in relatively short order in New York. It was an elaborate production and a fine cast, and after the closing notice had gone up, an unofficial wake began at Sardi’s in the early afternoon, at a prominent table.

The participants changed slightly, Tom Moore, the director, (who would go on to do “ ‘night, Mother), some of the actors, Dianne Wiest, Frank Langella; the set designer, assorted technicians--but always a steady supply of mourners, and no lack of either real emotion or drinks to heighten it. Finally, it became early evening, and Vincent Sardi went over to their table.

He was deeply distressed, he said, but their moist and lugubrious group would simply have to leave. They were affecting a whole restaurant full of pre-theater patrons, who were becoming too depressed to do anything but stare at them and suffer too.

But Sardi had also made discreet arrangements. The entire disconsolate little band was handed over to Joe Allen’s, just down the street, who agreed to let the wake run its course. And when it finally disbanded, and the mourners began to repair to their homes and their richly earned morning-afters, they discovered that their considerable tab had been quietly taken care of.

Now that is the Broadway of the old school, and the New York that lures, perennially.