SUMMER STOCK IN BIG APPLE

This is understudy city in August. I had hoped to catch up with James Earl Jones in “Fences.” Sorry, says the press agent--Jones has gone to the country for two weeks.

However, Peter O’Toole and Amanda Plummer have a couple of performances left in “Pygmalion” before O’Toole goes back to London. Would that be of interest? Definitely. Who could resist the chance to see these two originals in the same show?

It turns out they’re not. Plummer is playing a character by George Bernard Shaw, a flower girl who becomes a lady, and finds that she can’t go back. It’s the most straightforward performance that Plummer has given since she became a name actress, just at the point where assurance was needed that she wasn’t a bundle of quirks.

O’Toole is a bundle of quirks. As Prof. Henry Higgins, he wanders around the stage a lot, addresses the other actors without absorbing their presence, delivers his lines at whatever tempo and pitch amuses him, and in general seems to be looking for distraction rather than taking care of business.

The image is that of a spoiled dilettante who can’t keep his mind on anything for more than a minute. Some of this might apply to Shaw’s Higgins, whose mother (Joyce Redman here) treats him as though he were still a teen-ager. But it’s impossible to believe Higgins as an out-and-out flake. The suspicion, the other night, was that O’Toole was flaunting his charisma at the expense of the play. Either that, or he was plotting alternate routes to the airport.

Not everybody is out of town. Down in the Village, there’s actually an opening. “Psycho Beach Party” is from Theatre-in-Limbo, the folks who gave us such great titles (I can’t speak for the shows) as “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” and “Theodora: She-Bitch of Byzantium.”

Theatre-in-Limbo’s leading charismatic is Charles Busch. He calls himself a “postmodernist transvestite” specializing in “strong female role models.” He not only wrote “Psycho Beach Party,” he stars in it. Its original title was “Gidget Goes Psychotic,” but Columbia Pictures didn’t care for that, so Busch changed his character’s name to Chicklet.

The time is the early ‘60s, the place Malibu Beach. Chicklet is a flat-chested (darn it!) teen-ager who hangs around the beach waiting for the boys to notice her. Not that she wants to be Date Bait. She wants to be part of the gang. Who says that surfing is For Men Only?

Back to the beach! Thus far we are spoofing Annette and Frankie with the loving deadliness that the “The Boy Friend” once applied to the sappy musicals of the 1920s. The gang--Dee Dee, Kanaka, Marvel Ann--is all here, although not always of the expected gender.

Now comes the psycho part. Chicklet harbors a doppelganger--a prurient witch who talks like Kate Hepburn and who goes around with a razor. . . .

Not to worry: Her only fetish is shaving people who fall asleep on the beach. “Psycho Beach Party” has a dirty mind but a good heart, even allowing a certain tolerance for its Mommy Dearest figure (Meghan Robinson). And it is proud of its characters for coming out of the closet at the end--as when one guy has the courage to admit that he is a born square.

It’s a fun, forgettable show that could stand a few more production numbers (as when the guys and gals do--what else?--the limbo) and somewhat less gab.

Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival has two hits this summer. Uptown in Central Park--I didn’t get to it--is Stuart Vaughan’s back-to-basics version of “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” much more traditional than the festival’s rock version in the 1970s.

Downtown at the Public Theatre is Eric Bogosian’s “Talk Radio.” Bogosian, a dark, intense performer with a trace of New England in his voice, has played some performance-art dates in Los Angeles, but we have never seen him in a full-length play.

This has him as one of those “controversial” all-night talk show hosts, working out of Cleveland. Tomorrow night he goes network, so tonight is a kind of summing up, and there must be a full moon, because all the crazies are on the wire.

With Bogosian doing all the voices--which he could easily do--”Talk Radio” would be a dazzling theater piece. As a full-length, conventionally cast play, it’s less interesting. Bogosian has the emcee’s rap down to a science; there’s enough plot to keep you on the mark; the slightly sinister atmosphere of a late-night radio station is well established.

But the sections where the subsidiary characters come forward and tell us how they first met the emcee are a bore. And when the show signs off, there’s an empty feeling. What was that all about?

It’s not even clear what the emcee makes of it. It would help if we could see how the evening played in his own head, if he has decided to do things differently for the network, or if he realizes that he is trapped in a vicious format. But it’s all left up in the air. “Talk Radio’s” only message is “Garbage in, garbage out,” and everybody knows that.

True, the evening I saw the show, the program was full of little slips explaining which players were in and which were on vacation. Understudy city.