New York stage report: bright but not sunny

NEW YORK -- There was a lot of hand-wringing at the beginning of the theater season about the dearth of intelligent theater on Broadway. Except for the satirical musical with puppets "Avenue Q," there seemed to be nothing but empty crowd pleasers like "The Boy From Oz" or poorly reviewed revivals like "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

But Broadway usually gets interesting around this time, as the deadline for Tony consideration nears, and suddenly there is work by three of the greatest living theatrical voices -- Tony Kushner, Tom Stoppard, and Stephen Sondheim -- as well as a fascinating revival of Lorraine Hansberry's classic "A Raisin in the Sun." And while Neil LaBute's "The Distance From Here" is technically off-Broadway, it's playing in the heart of the theater district and is another example of why he is one of American theater's most provocative playwrights.

In fact, some might say that New York has gotten too smart for its own good as Kushner, Stoppard, Sondheim, and LaBute confront the very idea of why people go to the theater. If it is for entertainment or easy uplift, then these plays are not the place to look. If it is to confront a work of art that has the capacity to change how one looks at the world, then New York is a virtual treasure trove.

Along with the Pulitzer-winning "I Am My Own Wife," by another first-rate playwright, Doug Wright, and the British drama "Frozen," these are theater works that strip away almost every facade of sentimentality in favor of something much more bracing. And far more rewarding.

"Caroline, or Change"

Quite simply, this is a great musical. If it is a musical. Kushner, who wrote the book and lyrics, and composer Jeanine Tesori ("Violet," "Thoroughly Modern Millie") have created a work that is as much opera as musical theater. If one senses the presence of Rodgers and Hammerstein, it's the "Soliloquy" from "Carousel" rather than a traditional showstopper like "You'll Never Walk Alone." Leonard Bernstein is definitely here, too, but it's the Bernstein of the opera "Trouble in Tahiti," not of the musical "West Side Story." Yet just as popular culture is crucial to the Kushner sensibility in "Angels in America" and "Homebody/Kabul," "Caroline, or Change" is as indebted to the Supremes, Muddy Waters, and Marian Anderson as it is to the tonier aspects of what we think of as higher culture. And the singers come from musical theater, rather than opera.

This is the story of a black woman in 1963 Louisiana whose world is defined and constricted by her work as a maid in a Jewish household. She needs the money to support her four children (one is in Vietnam) even though she is never going to do much more than eke out a basic subsistence on her meager salary.

This is a semiautobiographical work, and the Kushner character is an 8-year-old boy, Noah, who adores Caroline, particularly since his mother has died and he can't stand his new stepmother. His stepmother, in turn, frustrated because he can't be bothered to take his change out of his pocket, tells Caroline to keep whatever money she finds when she does the laundry. This is part of the meaning of the title -- the other being the difficulty that we all have in dealing with change, whether it's personal or political.

Kushner and Tesori have found a way to make each of the characters heartbreaking without tugging at our heartstrings. When you look at the rhymes, for example, they are quite basic compared to the cleverness of a Sondheim or Oscar Hammerstein lyric. And the music never soars to anthemic crescendos.

But both musically and lyrically, this is every bit as smart as Sondheim and every bit as emotionally compelling as Rodgers and Hammerstein. Tonya Pinkins is phenomenal as Caroline, and her second-act aria of woe is literally breathtaking. Equally amazing is a Hanukkah scene in which Caroline, along with her friend and daughter, are serving dinner to the white family. Musically, klezmer alternates with R&B. Lyrically, Kushner has the characters debating everything from Martin Luther King's nonviolent tactics to the pain that children cause their parents.

And under George C. Wolfe's smart direction, they all pull it off brilliantly, particularly Pinkins and Anika Noni Rose as her daughter (who were both nominated for Tonys). Each of the actor-singers is thoroughly convincing, which says something, considering that many of them are playing inanimate objects such as washing machines and buses.

"Caroline, or Change" is performed in sung-through style, which I normally loathe in musical theater. Here, however, there is nothing at all pretentious about it. The whole piece reflects the aesthetic choice of two artists pushing each other to create the first great piece of musical theater of the 21st century.

"Assassins"

Meanwhile, the great composer of the second half of the 20th century finally gets to see his extraordinary reflection on presidential assassins land on Broadway. The Sondheim-John Weidman musical opened off-Broadway in 1990, but less-than-stellar reviews and the Gulf War limited its run. Then the Roundabout Theatre company postponed this production after the Sept. 11 attack. And what a production it is. It's filled with fine performances, and director Joe Mantello has invested the carnival setting where the assassins meet with an atmosphere that simultaneously underscores the satiric and the satanic.

These are all characters shut out of the American dream. They are frustrated in love, in work, and in politics. Killing a president is their chance to go for the gold -- to win Jodie Foster's attention or Charlie Manson's admiration, to change history, to gather a measure of immortality. Their logic is frightening, not least because their reasoning often makes a certain amount of sense.

First among equals here is the amazing Denis O'Hare, who won a Tony last year for "Take Me Out" and is nominated again this year. I always thought Charles Guiteau was one of the weakest parts of "Assassins," but O'Hare practically makes James Garfield's assassin the costar (along with Michael Cerveris's John Wilkes Booth), and his "Ballad" ("I Am Going to the Lordy"), which always seemed rather dull, becomes a showstopper.

It may be that many of these performances are actually too good -- so funny that they give credence to those who think the show merely glib (particularly because this production utilizes cabaret seating at Studio 54, with people eating and drinking at their tables). Add some of the jauntiest music Sondheim has ever written, and it's hard not to find the whole thing perversely entertaining.

There is nothing glib about it, though, particularly when you consider the show's ending -- John F. Kennedy's assassination and the reprise of "Everybody's Got the Right," in which all the killers sing about their right to the American dream. If, by the end of the show, a chill doesn't go up your spine, you stopped paying attention.

"The Distance From Here" and "Frozen"

The lowlifes of these two plays haven't been left out of the American dream, or the British equivalent, so much as they've been so damaged sociologically and genetically that they become walking time bombs. "Frozen" is the classic well-made British play, as Bryony Lavery divides the action equally among Nancy, a middle-aged British housewife; Ralph, who has abducted and killed her 10-year-old child; and Agnetha, an American expert in serial killers who has been brought in to examine Ralph.

Each is articulate in his or her own way. Each is emotionally frozen in his or her own way. Lavery has created a deeply humanistic work, challenging our notions about responsibility and revenge. When someone is as deeply scarred as Ralph (Brian F. O'Byrne is outstanding), how do we balance compassion for the victims, including Swoosie Kurtz (just as superb as Nancy), and contempt for the killer?

And yet "Frozen" seems a little too pat, a little too well ordered. If "Frozen" is the classic British play, then "The Distance From Here" is distinctly American, raw and tough as early Sam Shepard. The inbred families of LaBute's play -- it's almost impossible to tell who parented the stepsiblings played by Mark Webber and Anna Paquin -- throw "whatever" around the way David Mamet's characters use the unprintable word. Their inarticulateness speaks volumes about their station in life.

In his program notes LaBute talks about going to school with characters like these, slackers who are somewhere between working stiffs and white trash. The young are so abandoned by their mothers and fathers, who surely would not have passed a parenting test if a license were required, that sex and rage are all that's left them.

If Edward Albee is right, that playwrights should be slugging audiences in the face, LaBute is the heavyweight champion of our time. He has also been called the champion of easy cynicism, which itself is too easy a label. In the program notes he says of these characters, "they make me laugh, they make me frustrated, they make me sad."

The same goes for me looking at these characters, whom he makes impossible to write off, no matter how pathetic and even tragic their actions. Eliciting such a reaction is hardly the accomplishment of an easy cynic.

"A Raisin in the Sun"

Everything you've read about this production is true. Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald, and Sanaa Lathan are excellent, while Sean Combs isn't in their league -- never mind that of Sidney Poitier or Danny Glover. If Combs is one-dimensional in his portrayal of Walter Lee Younger, a black man in the 1950s who is trying to lift himself and his family out of a Chicago ghetto, he is certainly competent. That may not be the most rousing recommendation for Hansberry's play, but this is a unique production in its own right.

The night I went, the audience was mostly African-American. There were far fewer black faces watching the much better Huntington Theatre Company production in 1995 (also directed by the estimable Kenny Leon) -- or, for that matter, at any New York play I've attended, including "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk" or "Intimate Apparel," currently playing off-Broadway.

Combs has helped make this a bona fide event in New York's black communities and thereby introduced both an American classic and the uniqueness of live theater to some people who might never have experienced either. And for that he should be commended -- particularly since he must have suspected that the comparisons of his performance to Rashad's and McDonald's, as well as Poitier's and Glover's, were not going to be positive.

For audiences who grew up with the original or with later revivals, there is a tendency to dismiss "Raisin" as a great play you don't really have to see again. But there are so many good things about this production -- not just the three women -- that you realize the reason Hansberry's play has earned a spot in the pantheon is that it is no more dated than "Death of a Salesman." The historical setting reminds us that the search for dignity is both particular to its time and universal.

Families are more fragile than ever, as all these plays except for "Assassins" attest. Hansberry reminds us just how fragile. And how precious.

"Jumpers"

Intellectually, there is no one writing for the theater like Stoppard. This revival of his 1972 play -- commingling a philosophical treatise with a murder mystery, love story, jazz performance, and absurdist comedy -- isn't quite as successful at tying everything together as such later plays as "Arcadia," "The Invention of Love," or "Travesties." But with an awe-inspiring performance by Simon Russell Beale to juice things up, the Royal National Theatre production of "Jumpers" leaves little doubt about his preeminence as a playwright. Stoppard has neatly synthesized Samuel Beckett's quest to find meaning in an absurdist universe with a love of language and an abiding trust in the life of the mind guided by a belief in principle. The silence of God might test those principles, but Stoppard does not give up easily.

Here his persistence is represented by a pudgy, ineffectual professor of moral philosophy, George Moore, whose gorgeous wife has holed up with a nervous breakdown, treated by Archie, a smug doctor who is also the head of a leftist party and, one presumes, her lover. The professor (Beale) is stuck between a rad-lib rock (Archie's ruling party, which worships logic and science over emotion and poetry) and a yahoo hard place (symbolized by a conservative policeman who believes in absolute good and absolute evil).

Can the center hold? Not likely, but it's fun watching Stoppard making his characters into gymnasts. And did we mention the troupe of philosophical gymnasts? Or the silent secretary? Or the hare and the tortoise? Or the moon landing?

Or that you might want to forget about wine with dinner?

No matter: "Jumpers" is drunk enough for everybody, deliriously mixing moral philosophy with good humor, all delicously staged by David Leveaux. Like all these works, "Jumpers" is not the place to go if all you're looking for is a good time. But it is the place to go if you're looking for great theater.

Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.