REVIEWS : It’s a Public With Punch : George C. Wolfe looks more and more like Joseph Papp’s rightful heir as the Public Theater offers a new Sam Shepard play and a new playwright--and both have much to recommend them.

What’s happening at the Joseph Papp Public Theater would make Joseph Papp sit up in his grave, throw a white silk scarf over a black cashmere coat, and light a cigar. While not the impresario’s designated successor, George C. Wolfe is certainly Papp’s rightful heir. Papp’s interest in the experiences of the underclass, in opening the theater to actors and writers of varied ethnicities and in surprises that only the theater can supply are all in evidence at the Public, where four of the theater’s five stages are filled (the fifth has a show in rehearsal) and the lines at the coffee bar are buzzing with excitement. The artists presently at work here are clearly being encouraged from above with just the right blend of support and tyranny.

Wolfe also has Papp’s love for the commercial theater, which he showed in his dazzling direction of two Broadway shows, “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Angels in America.” It’s only a matter of time before he develops a commercial hit at the Public. But, for the meantime, the Public is doing just what it should be doing.

There are, however, at least two differences between Papp and the Public’s current leader: As a director, Wolfe shows once again he can make a play sizzle and burst with theatricality. Also, he can get along with Sam Shepard.

Both of these skills translate into very good news for Wolfe’s third season at the Public. Wolfe had his first real success as a 32-year-old writer/director at the Public with “The Colored Museum,” his vaudevillian telling of African American history, in 1986. And now, as a 40-year-old director, he has given another young playwright a shot at a title. Oliver Mayer, the 29-year-old Angeleno, developed “Blade to the Heat,” his play about a 1959 middleweight boxing championship, at the Mark Taper Forum. Mayer has received, ungenerously I think, mixed-to-negative reviews at the Public. Everyone agrees, however, that Wolfe’s direction is brilliant.

The world of boxing is not a subtle one, and neither is Mayer’s play subtle. The playwright examines a brutal universe where the first rule of the ring is to go for the other guy’s weakness. “If he’s got a cut in the eye, you gonna hit him in the elbow?” the main villain of the piece asks rhetorically. The play comes ready-made with a fascinating premise, and one that obviously engages Wolfe, who agreed to direct “Blade” almost immediately after reading it: How do boxers manage to express love for anyone other than the men in their corner, and, most complex of all, how do homosexual boxers love?

Further, Mayer is a sharp observer of the denizens of this insular demimonde; he offers three boxers who have their own reasons for embracing a life of brutality. In a complex, believable web of everyday insecurities, Mayer renders the catastrophes wrought by the rigid culture of the ring, one that is cousin to the subcultures of the military and the ghetto.

In 1962, as all boxing fans know, Emile Griffith virtually killed Benny Paret in a welterweight match at Madison Square Garden (Paret actually died 10 days later) after Paret called Griffith a Spanish slang term for homosexual at their weigh-in. Riffing on this scenario, Mayer gives us Mantequilla Decima (Paul Calderon), a charismatic middleweight champ with Romeo ways who somehow gets unseated by Pedro Quinn (Kamar De Los Reyes), a shy and unconfident kid who wants to be liked and who does not seem to feel that it is imperative to hide his homosexuality, the nature of which he is still figuring out in a tentative romance with a slick blues singer named Garnet (Carlton Wilborn).

The real agitator in the story is a third boxer named Vinal (Nelson Vasquez), who thrives on causing damage with his words as well as his fists. He voices what everybody suspects about Quinn and expertly eggs on a dangerous situation until it explodes for his benefit.

The pitch of the performances is quite high and could easily go over the top into overacting. But Wolfe creates a whole and wholly charged universe in set designer Riccardo Hernandez’s smoky ring, a place so thick with atmosphere that you can almost smell the blood and the sweat that appears during Michael Olajide Jr.’s superbly choreographed fights. Wolfe gives the actors rein to build a hyper-reality where no stake is small, either in love or in battle.

In addition, Wolfe brackets the action with the propulsive music of two percussionists on platforms on either side, and with sirens and car horns and the noise of the urban jungle, and--in the bouts themselves--amplifies the moaning and the private breathing to the pitch it would have for the men in the ring. Together, Wolfe and Mayer take you inside that ring for an intense evening of theater.

A long with the critics, Sam Shepard must also admire Wolfe. The movie star/playwright had a falling out with Papp in 1981 over a casting dispute on “True West.” “Simpatico” marks Shepard’s return to the Public and is his first full-length play since “A Lie of the Mind” in 1985. “Simpatico” throws strange characters together to explore perplexing and unlikely intimacies and reversals of fortune. The excellent cast, directed by the playwright, delivers what feels like a definitive reading of Shepard’s unexpected poetry, the way William Macy or Joe Mantegna often do in the work of David Mamet.

As in “True West,” “Simpatico” centers on two men whose relationship hinges on the strange fact that they seem like two parts of one man--one in control and successful, the other a wild wastrel with an odd innocence. They are bound by secrets--in this case involving a racing scam that went awry--that have destroyed one of them and threaten to engulf both.

Fred Ward plays the devastated Vinnie with the loose physicality of a hippie who hangs his ruined, handsome face because he knows he’s too old to be living the way he does. After a visit by Carter (Ed Harris), who supports him out of guilt for several historic wrongs, Ward goes wandering around the country with an old shoebox of pornographic photos that he somehow hopes will correct the injustices of the past. The trouble is, the man he hopes will want to buy them has moved on and simply doesn’t care about the past anymore.

That man, Simms (James Gammon), a cagey old turtle who’s seen it all, has a wizened face and eyes so slitty that you can’t see them. Simms, however, sees everything, and he speaks in cliched phrases (“You’re plowin’ in high cotton, aren’t you, Boy?”) that nevertheless are quite wise. An old Shepard hand and--like Harris--a mainstay of L.A.’s Met Theatre, Gammon has the whiskey voice of a second banana in a Preston Sturges film, and is as full of surety and exquisite comic timing.

F resh from her role as Harper in “Angels in America,” Marcia Gay Harden is wonderfully ditzy as Cecilia, a pawn in the game the men are playing who maintains her dignity without ever knowing what’s going on at any time. At home, pouring out tea and inane chatter in her flowered kimono, Harden waves her wrist in delicious and unintentional understatement when she tells Carter, “I am not a busy woman.” Later, she is comic and moving when she shows up for the Kentucky Derby seven months early in a deranged girl’s prom dress.

Beverly D’Angelo makes her stage debut (after appearing in “over one billion films,” as she notes in her Playbill bio) as Carter’s wife, Rosie, a woman who’s made a respectable life out of a sordid past. In her silk robe, just one tone paler than her tousled blond hair, Rosie looks as if she’s always just gotten out of bed, and not because she’s an invalid.

Shepard leads us to believe that “Simpatico” is Vinnie’s story, but Carter is the man who changes unexpectedly. Harris makes a tragicomic vaudeville out of Carter’s inexplicable transformance from a cocky, manipulative man into a pathetic, shivering, moaning pile of bones rotating on the floor.

Watching Vinnie help the incapacitated Carter into his pants, a viewer may sense that the characters’ psychic connection has somehow crossed all sensible and explainable boundaries, and yet it makes a very compelling sense all the same. While “Blade to the Heat” is the more conventionally constructed of these two plays, “Simpatico” delves deeper into the human psyche. It makes you feel that the Public is once again the kind of place where mysteries are unraveled and you still can’t explain them. That’s sometimes the best kind of theater.

* “Simpatico” and “Blade to the Heat,” the Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York, (212) 598-7150. $35.