STAGE : The Unromantic Theater Scene in New York

Romance is not in the air here this summer. Not even in the open air. Kevin Kline and Blythe Danner are playing “Much Ado About Nothing” in Central Park as though Benedick and Beatrice were brother and sister who are beginning to get on each other’s nerves. That’s a clever way to open Shakespeare’s “screwball comedy” (as director Gerald Freedman sees it), but toward the end we usually expect a little heart interest. Not this year.

Or consider Tony and Tina, who get married every night at Washington Square Church, in a charming audience participation theater piece called “Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding.” At the reception I asked Tina (Nancy Cassaro) how long she and Tony (Mark Nassar) had been going together. “Seven years,” she said. “Except for the two years when we split up.”

Maybe it’s the AIDS crisis, maybe it’s the fact that nobody wants to give up his condo, but people are having a hard time falling head over heels in love with anything these days. The summer’s most interesting shows suggest that today’s men and women are approaching each other warily, like members of separate tribes who aren’t positive that a rapprochement is still possible. It’s a major theme in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” on Broadway and in Martha Clarke’s “Miracolo d’Amore” downtown at the Public Theater, and it’s implied by David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly,” also on Broadway.

No one in the hip 1980s wants to end up like John Lithgow’s character in “M. Butterfly”--not only bereft of his lover but ridiculed for having loved him. Better celibacy than derision.

Flamboyantly staged by John Dexter, the play is the Lithgow character’s attempt to explain to his invisible audience (shades of “Amadeus”) how he ended up in this Paris jail cell.

Years ago it seems he met a beautiful Chinese actress, as modest as she was clever--the kind of woman who makes even an insignificant man feel like a warrior in the bedroom. The rub is that “she” turns out to be not only a spy but a man (played by B. D. Wong). And Lithgow’s humiliation is that everyone has decided that for 20 years he has passed off a homosexual relationship as a “normal” one.

To his knowledge, however, this isn’t true. “She” flummoxed him completely, to the point of convincing him that he had given “her” a child.

Yet Lithgow comes to see that he was at least the co-creator of this fantasy woman, so much more to his taste than his actual wife (whom Rose Gregorio does not make a virago). For 20 years he has been making love to an image from “Madame Butterfly.” This, too, is shame-making. Very well. He will take Butterfly’s way out.

Playwright Hwang sees Lithgow’s hero as symbolic of a man who can’t relate to a woman unless she humbles herself before him, and suggests that there is a good deal of him in every man. The play also suggests a parallel with the way the “masculine” West condescends to the “feminine” East, and that we face a moment of truth there as well--if Japanese car sales haven’t already provided one.

Feminists could leave “M. Butterfly” with compassion for Lithgow. He conveys the pathos of living a half-life, and he comes to grips with his delusions.

Less sympathetic are the two Hollywood sharpies at the center of Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” hilariously played by Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver. Stupid-clever to begin with, they don’t learn a thing.

They have agreed to co-produce a buddy-picture set in a prison. Now a woman (Madonna: yes, she can act) tries to bust up their “relationship.” She brings her concept for some cockamamie end-of-the-world picture to Mantegna’s personal attention--very personal--and gets him to “green-light” it.

This means killing the buddy-picture. But Silver finds a way to get it back on line, simultaneously managing to get the offending female off the lot. She may possess one piece of equipment that Silver doesn’t (as the boys used to say about Margaret Bourke White), but Silver and Mantegna are buddies, pals, practically brothers. Does a guy in Hollywood ace out his own brother?

Mamet the humorist relishes the way these sockless wonders can talk about the movies as being a “people business” while practically registering dollar signs in their eyes--and doesn’t present the Madonna character as being an angel.

But it’s suggested that she’s got a lot more going for her than Silver does. When Mantegna chooses his buddy over “the witch,” he loses the chance for a new life, and Mamet doesn’t see it as a fortunate choice, either for him or his movies.

The men in “Miracolo d’Amore” also prefer hanging out with the gang to making an effort with the opposite tribe. Where Clarke took her “Garden of Earthly Delights” from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, her new piece looks and sounds like the Italian Renaissance, with the men wearing the ruffs and dunce caps of commedia dell’arte, the women often wearing nothing.

The sexes dally from time to time, but they rarely commingle. The males point their fingers, fire guns, peer through telescopes, mildly batter the women and generally behave crassly--not enough to disturb the even tenor of the piece but enough to make them seem footling next to the women.

Naked or clothed, Clarke’s women make you think of Eve in the Garden--beautiful, unself-conscious figures who are content merely to stroll and to be, with no need to poke things and measure things. They do their best to communicate with the men, but each gender seems to have a different marching order and to return at the end of the piece to a separate cave. The “miracle of love” may be that they shared the space at all.

Clarke presents her vision in an interested way, rather than a despairing one. But the piece exhibits grave doubts about the future of relationships. The final image, at a window: A beautiful woman, sitting with a skeleton, presumably male. “Ciao” says the woman, and the skeleton waves bye-bye.

“Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding” suggests that the future of the race, at least the Italian part of it, is not in doubt. This show is the next best thing to going to a real Italian wedding, and it’s easy to forget that you’re not doing just that. We gather at the church, watch Tony and Tina get married by blissed-out Father Mark (Phil Rosenthal) and walk a couple of blocks to a local restaurant for the reception, where we dance and drink supermarket champagne until it’s time for Tony and Tina to leave for the Poconos.

Devised by a group called Artificial Intelligence, the show is the next step in inter-active theater. Where “Tamara” has the viewer standing next to the characters, “Tina” has him chatting with them in the reception line.

There’s plenty of commingling here. For instance, I had a slight run-in with Tony’s friend Dominic (James Altuner) when he saw me dancing with his girlfriend, something I thought was allowed at weddings.

Later, Tina’s mother (Susan Varon) showed me an album full of pictures of her dear departed husband and demanded to see pictures of my family. All I could produce was my driver’s license. “That doesn’t count!” Mrs. Vitali said, scandalized. “How can you not carry pictures of your kids?”

The basic events of the show probably remain the same every night, but Father Mark’s increasing jollity as the reception wore on seemed most realistic at the performance I saw, as did Sister Albert Maria’s (Elizabeth Herring) disgust when the band played a Madonna medley. “I’m not a prude,” she told me, “but I can’t listen to some of her lyrics and I can’t stand her calling herself Madonna. Not even a last name!”

Later I met Tony’s father’s girlfriend (Ginny Monroe), wearing a red backless dress dusted with spangles. She confided that when she and Mr. Nunzio get married (any day now) they are going to have the ceremony on a cruise ship, with everybody wearing bikinis.

At “I do,” she and he would join hands and jump into the swimming pool. I had found a romantic at last.