COMMENTARY : There’s No Drought Off Broadway : New plays by Jon Robin Baitz and Tony Kushner prove that there’s still juice on the New York stage--you’ve just got to look for it.

Neil Simon and his producer, Manny Azenberg, decide to open “London Suite” Off Broadway and confirm what everyone knows about the state of theater inside the most beautiful theaters in the world, the ones on Broadway where neither producers nor ticket-buyers can afford to be.

Ignoring Broadway, however, the new season in New York is fairly rich in plays, even without Neil Simon. As always, New Yorkers love to bitch about how the theater is virtually dead, even as they hail a cab for the Manhattan Theatre Club or the Public or Lincoln Center and fill up the tables at Joe Allen and Orso.

This season boasts a variety of terrific voices on display, in plays with settings as diverse as Upstate New York, Cucamonga (a.k.a. Sam Shepardville), Moscow and heaven. Jon Robin Baitz has set his new play in South Africa, where he spent a part of his childhood.

It’s called “A Fair Country,” and the night I attended a workshop production at Naked Angels--a kind of East Coast Actors Gang--celebrities were everywhere. There was Eric Bogosian speaking intensely with a woman, and Paul Rudnick joking with producer Scott Rudin while a semi-bearded man I believe to be Ethan Hawke waited to bend Rudin’s ear.

So, OK, is the playwright merely well-connected or hot? (A recent front-page story in the New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section dubbed Baitz and his partner, writer-director Joe Mantello, “Couple of the Moment in New York Theater.”)

The answer is no, he is not merely hot. That Jon Robin Baitz--a gifted and not particularly commercial playwright obsessed with the thorniest moral problems of our time--is a darling of the people who produce, write and star in mass-release movies is, to me, a very heartening thing. If anyone needs one, it’s a reminder that theater is essential and filters down to all levels of mass cultural consumption.

“A Fair Country” is titled not so much with irony as with subversion: The play centers on a white American family struggling to stay sane in South Africa in the 1970s. (An earlier version called “Dutch Landscape” was considered the nadir of the Mark Taper Forum’s 1988 season; it garnered reviews so terrible that they sent the playwright reeling into seclusion--and into a major re-evaluation of his art. The current, thoroughly overhauled version is slated for a Lincoln Center production next year.) Baitz offers a landscape where no one can be saved from the moral stench that defines it. As one character puts it, “There is no harbor.”

Alec (Patrick Breen), the oldest son, reaches outside the ivory tower of his parents’ Durban home by cultivating friendships with young black students who are suspected members of the African National Congress. Later, Alec further distances himself both physically and psychically from the professional deception his father regularly practices in his post with the U.S. Information Agency--he goes to Columbia University in New York to study journalism.

Harry (Ron Rifkin), the father, is a poetry-and-dance-loving diplomat who packages American culture for the South Africans and sells it on his Voice of America radio show; beyond that, Harry’s employer implicitly requests he pretend that everything in South Africa is how it should be. Occasionally, more nefarious requests are made.

Harry has been posted in South Africa for too long; his manic-depressive wife, Patrice (Maria Tucci), is becoming hysterical and is clinging inappropriately to her younger son, Gil (Matt McGrath). She calls the police when a black maid, whom she has slapped, fights back. When the police arrive, it is a black policeman who strikes the maid, sending her flying against a brick wall.

“I was happy,” Gil says of the incident. “I thought, ‘Just shut her up.’ ” Yet Gil’s cross is that he fully feels the horror of what he is becoming. In his schoolboy clothes he is already a member of the white elite, “going rotten, hating people, and lying about it, like they do.”

Each member of the family is so isolated in his particular anguish that their attempts to help each other are doomed to misfire. Harry is desperate to get his family out of South Africa, but no promotion is forthcoming. In the hope of securing a European posting, he trades some information, but his good intentions are meaningless in a place where good can only be perverted into hideousness.

Later, Harry gets his European posting, in The Hague. It’s New Year’s Eve, 1980. Carter is a lame-duck President; Reagan calls the Iranians barbarians while perhaps secretly negotiating the release of the hostages on the eve of his inauguration. Baitz’s gift for placing personal cost in a larger historical moment rivals Arthur Miller’s. The moral abyss that Harry inhabits seems reflected onto the world at large, making it all the more inescapable.

Meanwhile, President Carter’s thwarted attempts to do good seem inextricably linked to Harry, who feels himself sinking beyond hope just as he finally frees his family from South Africa. But what’s done can’t be undone, and the family is torn asunder, even as its members acknowledge that their love for each other is as unerasable as their deeds.

Tackling another historical moment in an even tinier and more downtown theater, the New York Theatre Workshop, Tony Kushner examines the near-religious fervor that gave birth to socialism and all of the destruction that fervor eventually caused.

I saw an early preview of “Slavs! (Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness),” which is directed by Lisa Peterson, who did such a superb job at the La Jolla Playhouse last season with Kushner’s adaptation of Brecht’s “The Good Person of Setzuan” and Pierre Marivaux’s “The Triumph of Love.” This production will probably be seen in the near future either at the La Jolla Playhouse or the Mark Taper Forum (or both).

While there is virtually no drama in the play, there are mysterious and beautiful images, and the writing is gorgeous. Kushner’s play is only marginally about the people affected by the failure of politics; it centers more on those people’s feelings about the ideas that fostered the practical reality in which they now find themselves. Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov (Joseph Wiseman), the world’s oldest Bolshevik, who delivered the prologue to the second part of “Angels in America,” returns, only to die from too much speechifying.

As in “Perestroika,” Prelapsarianov decries the “sour little age” in which we live without a “beautiful theory,” a “system of thought,” and he cries when he recalls the euphoria of first reading the “classic text”: “You cannot imagine it. I weep for you.” When he dies, a comrade sagely suggests, “His heart had good reason to murder his mind!”

One of his comrades, Upgobkin (Gerald Hiken), is ready for more than reform--he urges a leap into the future. “You can only crawl so far and then leap, or life will toss you in the air!” he exclaims while joyously leaping, like a deranged ballerina, around the stage, over the body of Prelapsarianov.

Kushner depicts the Russia wrought by all of this “beautiful theory,” which, it turns out, had as much to do with people’s lives and was as wise about human nature as a lunatic cult. Prelapsarianov’s beautiful dream turns out to be nothing but wishful thinking, repression and greed, and its legacy to the people is overt misery.

Among those living with the mistakes of the motherland on their backs are a beautiful lesbian alcoholic (not exactly typecasting for Marisa Tomei, who is very good), and her lover, a doctor (Mary Shultz, also excellent), who tries to help the people living above nuclear waste, whose children do not have long to live.

One child, Vodya (Mischa Barton), is mute and looks at the world through sad, accusing eyes. She gets to speak her piece when she arrives in heaven (or some place that is not Earth) and meets her “grandfathers,” the architects of the hell below. She, apparently, is one of the “Pygmy children of a gigantic race” that Prelapsarianov moaned about, one of those without theory. But when these two meet, it is touchingly without blame and with a shared regret for everything that cannot be changed.

Kushner sets the play in a cold climate where people love debate as much as he does--in Moscow circa 1985, where two old women sweeping the Kremlin steps debate the value of violence when it is used to create an improved version of society. This is not a place where teen-agers don’t know their state capital. You can feel Kushner’s wish for a country in which people argued with the intensity of Louis Ironson, the guilt-plagued protagonist of “Angels in America,” for a place where ideas are important.

That role (Louis) was played by none other than Joe Mantello, who directed Donald Margulies Broadway debut of “What’s Wrong With This Picture” and Terrence McNally’s Off Broadway production of “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (In this latter play, McNally establishes the reflective atmosphere in a country house on a succession of holiday weekends. Again, the playwright employs a setting that allows for poetry, a place suitable for characters with a predisposition to mull over love, life, eternity.)

South Africa, Moscow, Upstate New York. This season, all three settings are perfect places for words to unroll their vast magic in the only art in which language and image are equally important and inextricably bound. Perhaps these plays are an answer to the bitter heart of Prelapsarianov, who asks no one in particular, “Show me the words that will change the world, or else keep silent.”*