Women, Sense and Sensibility : Following the tradition of Shaw and Ibsen, Hare’s ‘Skylight’ updates feminism on the stage.

“Essays with legs” is how critic John Lahr described the plays of David Hare. Anyone who saw Hare’s “Racing Demon,” a commentary on corruption in the Anglican Church (which played the Doolittle in 1994), would probably agree.

“Skylight,” enjoying a superb production at the Mark Taper Forum, could also be described as an essay with legs, but only if you add that it moves around on them awfully well. In “Skylight” Hare personalizes the often bloodless issues that obsess him--divisions between classes, between the political right and the left, by compacting them into a battle of the sexes, alternately polite, tender and vicious.

The relationship of “Skylight’s” Kyra and Tom may be doomed, but the glue that binds them together holds just long enough for them to plumb their incompatibility. The wealthy and arrogant Tom doesn’t want to know what Kyra makes of his character; Kyra doesn’t want to care that Tom holds her work in low regard. But somehow, they have to know and they have to care. If it were otherwise, what meaning would their love affair have had?

It’s a process everyone dreads--the struggle to preserve a cherished self-image while an angry ex-lover launches dead-on assaults. As the missiles fly in Hare’s “Skylight,” we get to see two smart characters from unusually complex angles, both landing and receiving blows, reconnoitering and mending, causing fresh wounds that rip even deeper.

As Kyra and Tom, Laila Robins and Brian Cox are mesmerizing as they plow through the heavy snow of accusations never before spoken, the inexorable process by which lovers become ideological enemies in order to separate. “Skylight” may be unusual in the sober realism of its revelations, but Hare writes in a noble tradition. Let the movies delineate the chemistry of attraction; it is more often the theater’s domain to analyze incompatibility.

“Skylight” is a direct descendant of “A Doll’s House,” the first great modern play to acknowledge that men and women sometimes have to part, particularly if the woman is to live a full life. A British production of the 1879 Henrik Ibsen play just finished a sensational run on Broadway, thanks to a limber new translation by Frank McGuinness and performances that made what could have been anachronistic concerns alive and sexually compelling.

Nora (the riveting Janet McTeer) has been a bewitching sexual object, petted, manic and childlike: a psychological profile that, as is the traditional Chinese woman’s bound foot, is an aphrodisiac to her husband. Calm at last, near the end of the play, Nora informs Torvald, “I believe that I am a human being, just as much as you are.” It’s astonishing that Nora’s lines--so basic, so obvious--could cause people to dissolve in tears throughout the theater. These lines express, with startling economy, the sense of self-hood that makes true intimacy possible and that can, at the same time, necessitate its end.

The early feminism of Ibsen’s world took as its premise the essential equality of men and women, who should therefore be equal under the law. Now, 118 years and many laws later, in the age of “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” and the mapping of the human genome, we once again find ourselves admitting how different we are.

Now as in Ibsen’s time, when playwrights want to make divisions between sense and sensibility, they tend to give the more evolved sensibility to the woman in a warring couple. The more things change, the more women remain the representatives of moral advance, at least in the fictional imagination.

In “Skylight,” Kyra is clearly nobler, if not necessarily more likable, than the man she finds to be impossible to live with. She teaches poor kids; he’s an entrepreneur. But her moral plane is compromised by the fact that she had a six-year affair with Tom while his wife was alive.

Tom suggests that Kyra is attempting to relieve some kind of guilt by living alone in a cold-water flat with few material comforts in her life. She defends herself: “Everyone makes merry, discussing motive,” she says, referring to herself. “She does it because she’s unhappy. She does it because of a lack of herself. . . . Well, I say, what the hell does it matter why I’m doing it? Why anyone goes out and helps? The reason is hardly of primary importance.” She’s furious now: “If I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done.”

Tom’s views are equally compelling. A poor kid from “bog-ordinary people,” Tom now has very little sentimentality for the indigent or for anyone else. He is arrogant, successful and funny. Kyra finds it offensive that Tom leaves his driver downstairs waiting in the cold; he calls that not rudeness but employment.

Tom and Kyra represent two ways of looking at social responsibility and, like the left and the right in this country and in England, they are engaged in a battle full of self-righteousness on both sides. In Kyra and Tom’s case, just as in consensus politics, understanding cannot occur on one side’s terms, thus the audience is denied the comfort of seeing them stay together. They are two halves of a circle, but not, apparently, the same circle.

Kyra, Nora and Eliza Doolittle all have a more highly defined sensibility than the men they leave. For the most part, the men argue better. True, Torvald lacks wit and tends to stick to the level of “Abandon your home. . . . What do you think people will say?”

But in George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” Henry Higgins shows true chutzpah. He makes a case that his rudeness represents democracy. “The great secret,” he tells Eliza, “is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls.”

In “Skylight,” Tom wipes the floor with Kyra. Cox’s Tom is wonderfully outraged; he reels Kyra in by taking a presumably innocent look at her inadequate heater and starts in. “Look at that heater! Sitting there fulfilling some crucial psychological role in your life. There are shops, I mean, you know, shops, proper shops that exist in the street. These shops sell heaters. They are not expensive. But of course they are not what you’re looking for. Because these heaters actually heat!”

The men may argue better; the women are better. But “Skylight” adds an important twist. Hare allows us to doubt his heroine’s integrity. As he showed in “Plenty,” he is awfully good at exposing complex motivations behind angelic fronts. When Tom accuses Kyra of running away from the world, she uses her iron-clad defense about helping others.

But she sounds suspiciously neurotic when she declares that secret love, like their former adulterous affair, is the most intense kind of love. Tom suggests that she doesn’t have the courage to love out in the open, with her whole heart and that her addiction to misery is a problem.

Even if we fully appreciate Kyra’s independence, Tom’s criticism rings true. Neither Ibsen nor Shaw harbor such nagging doubts about the motives of their independent heroines.

Tom is a modern warrior whose money and whose smarts cannot win him the one thing he wants most. Kyra finds independence only outside of a relationship. Ibsen and Shaw both saw self-hood as a necessary step in a woman’s development. Hare clearly also sees it as an excuse to avoid the larger challenge of ongoing intimacy.

In the end, men may be from Mars and women are Venetians who actually have faults. The question remains, and Hare takes it further than his predecessors--on what planet do they then set the table?

* “Skylight” continues through Oct. 26 at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 628-2772. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. $29 to $37.