STAGE : The Laugh Doctor Is In : A sensitivity to the mechanics of comedy has earned director Jerry Zaks four Tonys and cheers from his peers

Director Jerry Zaks is one busy guy. He’s got “Guys and Dolls” packing them in around the corner on 45th Street, a second company of the show just out on tour, and understudies to worry about. Out in Hollywood, John Guare’s hit comedy “Six Degrees of Separation” starts its national tour Thursday at the Doolittle Theatre.

He’s apologetic, he’s cordial, but he’s busy. All day meetings are set tomorrow on his next show, David Henry Hwang’s “Face Value.” Two scripts a week are coming into the office, and stuff’s backing up.

These are lush times for Zaks. Crowned “the outstanding director of comedy in the American theater today” several years ago by New York Times critic Frank Rich, Zaks, 46, keeps topping himself. At Lincoln Center, he directed highly regarded productions of not just “Six Degrees” but “Anything Goes” and “The Front Page.” His revival of “Guys and Dolls” couldn’t have gotten better reviews if he’d written them himself.

Look around his office, a veritable shrine to success. Walls and bookcases are filled with framed certificates and awards, and his peers keep throwing Tony Awards at him--for “Guys and Dolls,” “Six Degrees,” Guare’s “House of Blue Leaves” and Ken Ludwig’s “Lend Me a Tenor.”

The man Time magazine recently called “the dominant director of his era” is perched at the edge of his chair, his motor purring. He talks fast, his thoughts and ideas tumbling out in a rush. Asked at one point to pause while the reporter catches up, he obliges by leaping to his feet and pacing.

That energy fuels his direction of “Six Degrees of Separation,” Guare’s non-stop take on alienation, family values, culture and class in contemporary society. Based on a real-life incident, “Six Degrees” traces the impact of a convincing con artist on the lives of assorted people he encounters in his scam.

In 1983, 19-year-old David Hampton successfully passed himself off as the son of actor Sidney Poitier (who has no sons), to several sophisticated New Yorkers. Hampton arrived at each home saying he’d just been mugged and knew his host’s children, then usually stayed with and took property from his prey.

Osborn Elliott, then dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, was one of Hampton’s victims, and told friend Guare about his experiences. A while later, Hampton was arrested and the story widely reported.

Hampton wound up spending 21 months in a state prison; he was paroled in 1986. The playwright filed it all away until 1989, when, after “percolating” for six years, it took shape as “Six Degrees.”

He turned the finished play over to Zaks and designer Tony Walton, Guare says, with just one requirement: “Make it go like the wind.” There are no intermissions, no scenic stop signs on this 90-minute journey--nothing brakes the action from the moment Flan and Ouisa Kittredge rush onstage to tell their story.

Here’s their story: Art dealer Flan and wife Ouisa were wooing a wealthy art investor at home when the doorman and a bloodied young man named Paul burst into their Fifth Avenue apartment. Robbers stole Paul’s money and briefcase in nearby Central Park, and he knew of the Kittredges from their children Talbot and Woody. His father, Sidney Poitier, was due in New York to begin directing the film of “Cats” but not until the next day.

So it starts. Seventeen different characters eventually take the stage to talk to the audience or to one another, intermingling witty banter with monologues on everything from Poitier and Wassily Kandinsky to “Catcher in the Rye” and imagination. They disclose family secrets, analyze their dreams, trash Andrew Lloyd Webber and one another.

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Guare’s manuscript “took off like a rocket,” Zaks recalls. “I was thrilled and exhausted by the time I read it, exhilarated. John Guare is one of the greatest storytellers I know, and it was as if 17 different John Guare inventions raced into a room and all said at the same time, ‘Have we got a story to tell you. Who wants to go first?’ ”

Onstage transitions for a play as episodic and film-like as “Six Degrees” have to be equally cinematic, says Zaks. “I don’t like dead time on stage,” he says. “I don’t like the audience waiting patiently in the dark for a scene to transish. The magic dies in those moments.”

Zaks and designer Walton opted to keep things minimal and spare, not unlike Guare’s writing. The audience, he says, would have to rely on imagination: “The two sofas would be the living room in the Kittredge home, they would be benches in Central Park and they would be every place we tell you that they are.”

Another way to keep things moving was to eliminate traditional entrances and exits. Both at Lincoln Center, where it was originally staged, and at the Doolittle, characters use front-row seats to come and go, hand up props and take them away.

Such staging, explains Zaks, makes everything immediate. “People don’t have to make conventional entrances. One scene can end, and boom, somebody can stand up and be in the (next) scene, the way that it happens when you read it. It is the kind of transition that happens when you turn a light switch off.”

What attracts Zaks to a project? “In ‘Howards End,’ E.M. Forster writes ‘only connect,’ and I like to think that on some level in most if not everything I work on, that need for one person to somehow connect to another is what ultimately it’s all about.

“In ‘Guys and Dolls,’ so much of the humor comes from watching Sky and Sarah cope with their need to connect. It’s the same with Adelaide and Nathan, and it’s the same with Ouisa and Paul. This is not a play about some scam artist. It is certainly inspired by that incident, but it’s a play about the unlikeliest of people connecting and then missing that connection.”

Humor helps illuminate those connections for Zaks, who has long been drawn to the absurdist, black humor of playwrights like Guare and Christopher Durang. Zaks directed the 1986 revival of Guare’s play “House of Blue Leaves” at Lincoln Center and, says Guare, “Jerry knows where the jokes are. He knows how to build a joke and protect a joke so it doesn’t appear jokey.”

That’s because comedy is serious stuff to Zaks. “To me, good shtick is comic business that continues to tell the story, and perhaps clarify and focus the story,” says Zaks. “You have to orchestrate it, to ensure that it is clean, that laughter doesn’t bleed over into the words.

“Every time the audience laughs, it feels like a thousand people saying ‘good for you,’ ” Zaks acknowledges, but he adds quickly that directing comedy “is not a conscious choice. It’s not that sophisticated. (But) laughter is powerful. It’s about some form of an ecstatic experience.

“I had no intention of having anything to do with the theater in my life,” continues Zaks, born in Germany the first child of Holocaust survivors. Raised in New Jersey, he went to Dartmouth planning to study medicine but was permanently detoured by both the thrill of acting and the impact of just watching a student production of “Wonderful Town.” He switched career paths, emerged from graduate school at Smith with a degree in theater and, in 1969, headed for New York to become an actor.

First as an actor and now as a director, Zaks gravitates toward material “where I feel it and I together can provide some sort of special ecstatic type evening. You know how you feel when you wake up after a wonderful dream? Everything is fit together in the most desirable way possible. I always hope that the experience of an audience seeing a production of mine will not be unlike having a wonderful dream--that they come out of it somehow renewed and happier.”

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It took him six months to cast “Guys and Dolls,” he says, because it wasn’t easy to find actors “who could create life-and-death stakes and still be funny. ‘Guys and Dolls’ is not a piece about introspection or the darker side of life. It’s about a man desperately in need of a damn crap game who is being driven crazy by the fact that he can’t round one up. It’s about a woman who desperately wants to get married to this guy she’s been engaged to for 14 years.”

Yet Zaks never puts his characters down, whether they’re the high-living Kittredges or the forever-single Adelaide. In “Lend Me a Tenor,” for instance, what we see as farce isn’t farcical to the people involved. They may have been running around slamming doors, he told one interviewer, but we have to care about what they get or don’t get as they open and shut those doors.

“When something doesn’t feel right, you (ask yourself) what’s not right with this picture?” says Zaks. “Characters have to pursue what they want in a way that’s consistent with the possibility of getting it. They can’t behave in a way that would jeopardize their getting what they want. They have to be credible.”

Consider, for instance, when Paul comes hurtling into the Kittredge home, suggests Zaks: “When Paul is taken into the other room, the doorman is told to get a doctor, and Paul says, ‘No, it’s OK, I’ll survive.’ An actor playing Paul could shout (those lines) in great alarm, but he must not, because, if he does, we wonder why the other people in the room don’t get suspicious. The characters in the room would then appear less intelligent. The choice to preserve a happy ending for Paul is to throw away the line, to be ingratiating.”

The irony of “Six Degrees” may be that so unbelievable a tale was drawn from actual incidents. Events were so real, in fact, that original Poitier pretender Hampton sued Guare, Lincoln Center and others last fall for civil damages, charging Guare used Hampton’s life as play fodder. Hampton lost his case--good news to other playwrights, novelists and screenwriters--but was back in criminal court in New York recently.

On Oct. 1, Hampton was acquited of one count of aggravated harrassment regarding phone calls to Guare. The jury deadlocked on a second count that involved a message left on Guare’s telephone answering machine. Hampton will be retried on that count later this year, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Even without all the courtroom attention, “Six Degrees” starts its national tour in Los Angeles as a fairly known commodity. In addition to garnering a Tony for Zaks, the play won the 1991 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play and was lauded in the New York press as little short of a masterpiece.

How will the show play in Los Angeles, far away from Fifth Avenue and Central Park? Well, says Guare, it’s been playing in London since August and opens in Sydney and Istanbul later this month; the film version starts production in March, directed by Fred Schepisi. “Country people” sent by friends saw the play in New York, Guare says, and told him, “It’s about us. It’s about who you open your door to and who you put your faith in.”

Marlo Thomas will be opening that door as Ouisa at the Doolittle. John Cunningham reprises the role of Flan he played in New York.

Ouisa notes toward the end of the play that everyone on the planet is separated from everyone else by just six people, but you have to find the right six people to make the connection. And in directing Ntare Mwine as the young impostor, says Zaks, he found his own “extraordinary ‘Six Degrees’ experience.”

Zaks says he cast Mwine, who is making his professional debut in this show, after auditions set up by casting people, “and there was something familiar about his last name. On the second day of rehearsal, I said a guy I knew in college had the same name and was the first person I’d met from Africa. He asked where I went to school. I said Dartmouth, and he said, ‘That was my father.’ ”

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Zaks does some film acting--including a recent cameo in Woody Allen’s new film, “Husbands and Wives”--but indicates little interest in directing films at this point in his life. He’s still learning about theater, he says, and he likes being in New York with his family. “I’ve spoken to people about it,” he says. “I’ve read scripts. But I just haven’t really found a script that has elicited the response (he’s had to plays).”

Besides, he has such an enviable perch in the theater. He’s been based at the Jujamcyn Theaters offices here since 1990 where he receives a salary but has plenty of freedom. He’ll make his “best effort” to direct plays in Jujamcyn’s theaters, he says, but “what I do is subject to no one’s approval.”