TV Reviews : A Refreshing, Revisionist Drama About Nathan Hale

“General Motors Playwrights Theater,” airing on cable four times a year, is the only series on television that looks like drama from TV’s “Golden Age”--that is, the style and the tone suggest a short play, not a movie or a telefilm. Even PBS’ “American Playhouse” almost always resembles a movie, not a play in a theater.

Emblematic of this stage-worthy spirit, and launching the series’ third season, is a curious work of revisionist U.S. history, “Hale the Hero” (on Arts & Entertainment tonight at 6 and 10), with Lauren Bacall back as host.

Playwright Richard Vetere takes the storied Nathan Hale, whom every American child is taught to idolize, and fancifully plays with the notion that young Capt. Hale (Kevin Anderson) was in fact a deserter and running home to mom when he was captured by the British in 1776. But rather than debunk Hale, the script, by focusing on the human forces that propel martyrdom, turns him into much more of a genuine and accessible hero than the larger-than-life, waxed figure sanitized in schoolbooks.

Set almost entirely in a greenhouse in a New York riverfront mansion commandeered by the British, the production is alternately jocular and tender in dramatizing the reluctant leap to heroism of a soldier who plays every game in the book to avoid being hanged as a spy.

In this intriguing revision (directed by Steven Robman), Hale hates the war, wants nothing of heroism and rebuffs the fervor of a beautiful rebel spy (Elisabeth Shue) sent by Gen. Washington to coax him into sacrificing his life for the great symbol his death would serve to the rest of the desperate American troops.

Hale flatly refuses. He wants to live. But then, under pressure from the British to betray the rebels and save his hide, Hale proves no traitor and courageously goes to the gallows, following a romantic tryst during the last two hours of his life with the female spy (don’t laugh; the love scene is quite tenderly staged).

In Anderson’s scrappy, vibrant performance, Hale’s last words are one of those old-fashioned declarations that stir the blood, including those immortal words: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

Americans are fascinated with heroes who die young--when Hale went down in history, he was only 21. That it’s the young who do the dying in wars is part of the playwright’s unstressed message. But, basically, Vetere has fashioned the story of a great hero with a refreshing veneer of cynicism. In short, the playwright has it both ways. Not a bad trick to pull off.