NEW YORK STAGE REVIEWS : Illuminating the Plays in the Tony Afterglow

NEW YORK —  In the aftermath of the strongest Tony contest in years, it is surprising to note, nonetheless, how very few superior plays and productions are jamming the New York theater scene--and not all of them, of course, on Broadway.

On Broadway and off, it’s the usual scramble for good shows, shows that really shake you up, really stick in the mind--comically or dramatically. Jerry Sterner’s “Other People’s Money” at the Minetta Lane is this season’s perfect Off Broadway entry: an imperfect production of a sizzling play, with a giant performance at its core by Kevin Conway as Larry the Liquidator. And it’s pertinence--focusing as it does on the greed and gamesmanship of corporate takeovers--makes a skillful argument for the “other” point of view. The unexpected one.

You might say the same for Peter Shaffer’s “Lettice and Lovage” on Broadway, an experience people tend to frame within the following reference: “Not much of a play, but don’t miss Maggie Smith’s performance in it.” Well, Smith who rightly won the Tony on Sunday for that performance, couldn’t have done it without Shaffer’s play, an instrument he expertly designed for all her most reprehensible weaknesses.

She plays Lettice Douffet, a wildly eccentric Englishwoman (there are none wilder), who, as a tour guide for the Preservation Trust, embellishes English history to avoid the saturating boredom of her job. But the fun begins when Douffet is caught and confronted with her exaggerations by the Trust’s indignant keeper, Lotte Schoen (a splendid if less flamboyant Margaret Tyzack, rewarded with a Tony for best featured performance) and the play takes off in uncharted directions.

In the annals of pure comedy, pumping up the human spirit without being too predictable is an underestimated virtue. As does Shaffer, Lettice insists on avoiding the “mere,” as in “mere”-ly pedestrian. Nothing she is or does is “mere”--and that goes double for Smith, who delivers the word with such a withering nasal inflection that she makes it sound like an absolute allergy.

Smith won the Tony because she gets away with every un-”mere” bit of personal shtick for which she has ever been condemned, reviled and adored. It is a positively unconscionable performance, in which you wouldn’t want to change a tittle or a jot. But she also gets plenty of support from her accomplices--Tyzack, Bette Henritze as the formidable Tyzack’s traumatized secretary, and Paxton Whitehead as an incredulous and very gray attorney. Director Michael Blakemore gets plenty of credit, too, for knowing just how far to support these conjoined eccentricities, and when to fall back.

Nothing else on or off Broadway comes anywhere near the sheer pixillation of this performance, though one or two performances are a match for Smith’s personal flamboyance: Robert Morse’s vaulting portrayal of Truman Capote in Jay Presson Allen’s one-man “Tru” (a dark flamboyance here, that will eventually consume the keeper of the flame) and Charles S. Dutton’s loud and swaggering Boy Willie in August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” a play, performance and production slighted, bafflingly, by the Tony voters.

Craig Lucas’ “Prelude to a Kiss,” which had its promising origins at South Coast Repertory two years ago (with the same director, Norman Rene), offers a muted, more intellectual kind of dazzle in its Broadway incarnation at the Helen Hayes. It is at once clearer, more mysterious and more gripping and somber than one remembers it.

Some of that power can be attributed to the presence of Mary-Louise Parker, who makes a tantalizing virtue of delayed response as Rita, the unsuspecting bride kissed by an old man at her wedding--an event that triggers startling preternatural events.

So rarely do we see the forces of darkness invoked in contemporary drama (though “The Piano Lesson” does it too), that the other mesmerizing aspect of this piece is its premise. Lucas has streamlined the action to the point of understatement, nicely offsetting its humor. Something of a relief here, because without humor, “Prelude” could have capsized from too much seriousness, which also might have been mistaken for the pretentiousness it only narrowly escapes.

Timothy Hutton (who replaced Alec Baldwin when the play moved to Broadway) is a bit bloodless as the befuddled Peter, the unhappy bridegroom left at the altar with an old geezer in disguise. But Barnard Hughes’ elfin touch as that Old Man provides exquisite balance. One also hopes the reason designer Loy Arcenas opted for the ungainly unit set featuring a large blue window (Lucas is the author of a play called “Blue Window”) goes beyond inside jokes.

Two major disappointments: George C. Wolfe’s expanded version of “Spunk” at the Public Theatre and Richard Nelson’s “Some Americans Abroad” at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont.

“Spunk” was originally an expressive hourlong adaptation of three Zora Neale Hurston short stories that were admired last year at the Itchey Foot (as part of the Mark Taper Forum’s literary cabaret). The new “Spunk” has been extrapolated by its adaptor/director into an overproduced 2 1/2-hour strutting machine.

Not only is it no fun anymore, but it indulges in an unrestrained display of black stereotypes. Those (and there were many) who recoiled at Wolfe’s tendency toward such antics in his “The Colored Museum” would be horrified by their full flowering here.

Nelson’s toothless satire of overly Anglophile Americans, on the other hand, gums its way through witless exposition in the first act and loses it entirely in the second. “Some Americans Abroad” starts out to be an indictment of worshipful academics on a theater tour of England, but ends up being a soft look at a possible sex scandal that reveals these university types for the wimps they are.

All bark, no bite. It’s the old story: Beware of plays about bores; they tend to be boring. Beware of plays where people sit and eat a lot. They tend to be about maneuvering mush. But then many in the audience were ahead of the writer.

Like Lettice in “Lettice and Lovage” they recognized the “mere”-ness of it all and registered their displeasure by merely leaving at the intermission.