IT’S NEVER THE SAME PLAY TWICE

“How can you stand to see the same old plays over and again?” a friend asked. “I’d be bored to death.”

When it’s Carol Channing doing “Hello, Dolly!” again--agreed. But a good revival never feels like the same old play. The script may be the same. But the actors aren’t. And that changes the equation.

Take George Kelly’s “The Show-Off” (1924.) The definitive revival, I used to think, was Ellis Rabb’s staging for the APA in 1967, with Helen Hayes as the grandmother, a comfortable old lady who couldn’t find her glasses even when they were on the end of her nose.

What a surprise when Nan Martin took the same character at South Coast Repertory in ’85 and made her into an edgy matriarch with justified doubts about her offspring. Same lines, new play. This is not boring.

Not only are the actors different when a play gets revived, the times are different. That affects the equation as well. A play can say one thing to its original audience, but carry a different message a few years later. Sometimes a very few years later. South Coast’s current show is Christopher Durang’s “Beyond Therapy”--still a funny look at the sexual revolution, but not quite so funny as it was in ‘81, before the AIDS epidemic.

Time does funny things to plays. Some lose their sparkle; some find a new character. You can’t predict which it will be. Maxwell Anderson’s “Winterset” looked to be a modern classic in the 1930s, while Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” looked like an ephemeral drawing-room comedy. Guess which one gets played today?

“The Importance of Being Earnest” (now at the Los Angeles Theatre Center) is another irreverent survivor. Written in 1895, this wasn’t played as a “revival” until the late 1920s. Until then, Cecily and Gwendolyn wore their skirts at whatever length was smart that year.

We still see “Earnest” as a young play, but it does have a few jokes that don’t register today: for instance, the one about dentists invariably producing “false impressions” (i.e., clumsy casts of his patient’s mouths). Should the modern actor spell out the joke or throw it away?

Throw it away; the other would be too earnest. It’s also dreary to hang a concept on this play. Director Charles Marowitz has some notes in the LATC program to the effect that Algy and Jack are gay. Either he changed his mind or the story defeated him, for by opening night this sub-theme was so sub as to be invisible.

A good general rule for staging revivals is: Trust the script. The script, not one’s general impression of the script from previous revivals. The Royal Shakespeare Company has done very well over the the last 25 years by following this procedure: (1) know what the words mean; (2) make them live. There is room for infinite variety within that pattern.

Trusting the script also means having confidence in the it. LATC’s current revival of “Come Back, Little Sheba” has the words right, and Tyne Daly and Charles Hallahan make a plausible Lola and Doc.

But on opening night there was a reluctance to take the play to extremes. Lola’s house wasn’t all that messy; Lola wasn’t all that isolated; Doc’s drunken fury wasn’t all that savage. We were looking back on the play from the 1980s, appreciating its charm as a genre piece, but not giving it credit for being able to harrow an audience, as it once did.

Perhaps “Sheba” has lost some of its potency on the shelf, but it would have been brave of director Ray Danton to shoot for it. The most exciting revivals put us back in the original audience, holding our breath as the man reaches for the ax. . . .

Trust the script--unless, in fact, you don’t trust it. Revisionist revivals work best when the director has a real grudge against the play. Marowitz’s staging of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” wasn’t just an attack on that particular script, but on all the plays and movies that end with a brave little man turning the tide against evil with one ringing speech--as if it were that easy.

Without changing Dr. Stockman’s defiant last words, Marowitz gave them an underlay of indecision and fear, and Ibsen’s hero came down from his pedestal. Perhaps this should be called an anti-revival, but it brought “Enemy of the People” to life more drastically than many a straight revival. If a director can’t love a play, he should hate it.

What he shouldn’t be is bored with it, like a mother trying to think of what to serve for lunch. Oh, no--not “Hamlet” again. How are we going to do it this time? On the moon? As a wrestling match? How about mud wrestling, with an all-female cast?

German directors are especially prone to this nonsense. Shakespeare survives. He’ll survive Charles Ludlam’s spoofing “Titus Andronicus” in Central Park this summer too. His plays are tough.

That’s one reason we revive plays: to test their durability. Moss Hart’s “Light Up the Sky” was a clever backstage comedy in 1948, but on the evidence of its recent all-star revival at the Ahmanson (we use this phrase loosely) it does not have much to say to audiences in the 1980s.

Other plays haven’t aged a day. Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959) played the Wilshire this spring. There wasn’t a line, a character or a situation in it that didn’t apply to 1987. At the same time, it was a letter from the past, reminding us that things hadn’t changed that much. Take Beneatha, the daughter in “Raisin.” She reminds us not only that young women wanted to be doctors in 1959 but that some of them actually made it.

Other revivals can be called retrievals. The original 1946 production of O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” for example, was a flop. It took Jose Quintero’s 1956 revival, with Jason Robards as Hickey, to tap into O’Neill’s power.

A more recent example is John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves,” now at the Pasadena Playhouse. This wasn’t a flop in 1971, but it wasn’t what you would call a mainstream play, either. It seemed as much a libel on the American way of life as Jules Feiffer’s “Little Murders” (also being revived this season Off-Broadway).

In the 1980s--no problem. This may not say much for the ‘80s, but it says a lot for Guare’s prescience as to just how zany American life would become.

The Pasadena production also shows how an individual actor can make a new play out of a used one. Rue McClanahan doesn’t shine at the expense of her character, a crazy lady named Bananas. Nor does she shine at the expense of the rest of the cast.

She simply shines. There isn’t a trace of the avenging angel in this Bananas--a line that other actresses have taken. McClanahan’s wife takes her cues from the Blessed Mother. She sees all, knows all and is ready to forgive all, as long as they don’t send her to the funny farm.

All she requires is to be left in the corner, where she will twinkle like a good deed in a naughty world. When she considers just how naughty a world it is, she’s sad and when she catches her husband deceiving himself, she’s angry. But cheerfulness is her normal state of mind. Being crazy isn’t so bad. Being discarded is what’s insulting.

To explain how McClanahan can tell us all this about Bananas and still keep her a comic character is beyond my skill, but she does so. Will any other actress ever find as much to play in this role?

That’s why I keep going to revivals.