The artistic director of the renowned Public Theater is known for his sometimes manic enthusiasm. He’s like the Music Man leading the parade while singing a rousing rendition of “Seventy-Six Trombones”—and no particular harm in that. But in his natural exuberance, he gets things wrong. Among a number of lapses I could mention, by far the most serious is that he’s lately begun paying tribute to “the founders of the Public Theater, Joseph Papp and Bernard Gersten.”

The first time was on national TV during his excited acceptance speech when the Public won its well-deserved Tony for Hair. Then, at the recent gala dinner for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night, Mr. Eustis twice celebrated his new co-founders of the Public, Joseph Papp and Bernard Gersten.

Mr. Eustis surely means no harm—or offense—in his rewrite of theater history. But his surprising pronouncement comes as a shock to at least a few of us—including, I dare say, the good Bernard Gersten.

Mr. Gersten, the distinguished executive producer of Lincoln Center Theater, was the late Joseph Papp’s associate producer and loyal right-hand man for 18 years, and his honorable place in New York theater history is assured. But he began working for his old friend in 1960—six years after the legendary Papp dreamed up his most extraordinary achievement of free Shakespeare in the Park.

The autocratic Papp wasn’t always loved, and he wasn’t always fair. But his victorious battle with New York’s all-powerful Robert Moses for free Shakespeare and the building of the open-air Delacorte Theater in the Park has long since gone down in theater history. Mr. Eustis has only to glance at Helen Epstein’s vivid, authorized biography, Joe Papp: An American Life, to learn that Papp alone founded the New York Shakespeare Festival—which became the Public Theater—and that Mr. Gersten himself has paid generous tribute to the fact.

In his cruelest act, Papp fired Bernard Gersten for vague and paranoid reasons. Ms Epstein records how years later, Mr. Gersten described himself as Kent to Papp’s King Lear. “What would you with me, sir?” Lear asks Kent. “I would serve you, sir,” Kent replies.

Papp also fired another of his lieutenants, Merle Debusky, his loyal press man and wise counselor for 30 years. He also fell out lethally with Stuart Vaughan, his first artistic director during the 1950s. Theater has never been a relaxed place.

But the least Mr. Eustis could do is get Papp’s legacy right. He’s been gone nearly 18 years. Yet it’s only a short while ago that the theater he founded on Lafayette Street was named the Joseph Papp Public Theater.

Memory still ought to count for something—yes? It’s why we look to Oskar Eustis to do the right thing and set the record straight.

PAPP’S ORIGINAL ideal for Shakespeare was basically anti-British. He reacted passionately against the declamatory high acting style of the British thea-tah. As a Brit who was raised on Shakespeare, I’ve always been in favor of Papp’s profound belief in a refreshing American naturalism and wit. I draw the line only at the Public’s frustrating tradition of Shakespeare in the Park productions where anything goes.

The pleasure of Daniel Sullivan’s new production of Twelfth Night, subtitled by Shakespeare or What You Will (“Anything Goes,” as it were)—is in the veteran Mr. Sullivan’s mostly superior cast and unusual care in the verse-speaking. Its weakness, ironically, is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Its even, predictable pace isn’t swift or manic enough for Shakespeare’s festive, wild imaginings about an illusory Illyria where everyone falls madly in love with the wrong person. The romantic comedy’s seductive, cross-dressing eroticism is absent. In her lovely, assured Shakespeare debut as Viola disguised as a boy, Anne Hathaway makes a better boy than a girl. Her dashing disguise in drag as Cesario frees her. Ms Hathaway has it all—except, as yet, the experience that allows lyricism to breathe unhurried.

But the strange and wonderful sexual attraction between Viola/Cesario and Duke Orsino (Raúl Esparza, dripping in curls and melancholy) never begins to come to the beguiling boil. Sexual repression is a particular kind of Englishness—an England where the rain it raineth every day beyond a retractable roof.

The Olivia of Audra McDonald is at first too arch, and her yearning for Cesario, alas, too broad. David Pittu is in excellent voice as an assured Feste, although he drifts into camp. (The appealing original score is written and performed by Hem.) Julie White is swell—and great fun—as the scheming below-stairs broad, Maria. But Sir Toby Belch, that cut-price Falstaff, has always been a pickled, belching bore to me, no matter who plays him. The idiotic aristocrat, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, less so—particularly when played so amusingly by Hamish Linklater. But a Malvolio who cannot ultimately touch us in his too punished self-delusion and ambition is no Malvolio.

Twelfth Night’s Illyria is England. Whereas the new production’s Illyria appears to be a tree-lined miniature golf course with little astroturf hillocks. No matter! That’s almost comfortingly normal at the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park, where anything—usually—goes.

jheilpern@observer.com

His controversial letter raises a number of interesting points (and hackles), and at the risk of offending everyone, I’ll tiptoe with Mr. Fernandez into the minefield.

My first thought when I heard about the casting of Phylicia Rashad was that she’s surely too beautiful to be playing the screaming, zonked-out old hag of August: Osage County. My second, more cynical thought was that the producers need a star actress to bolster flagging audiences, and that ever since her Clair Huxtable on the The Cosby Show, Ms. Rashad transcends racial barriers, anyway.

I pondered on the offended Mr. Fernandez’s central argument: “It doesn’t make sense that she would have white siblings and children.”

Are plays about what makes sense? Or are they acts of the imagination between the actor and audience in a serious game of pretend?

All actors—black or white, Asian, biracial, bisexual—pretend to be someone else onstage six nights a week, plus matinees. The actor is always … acting. We willingly suspend our disbelief to collude in a grand illusion.

Andre Braugher played the white English hero of Agincourt, King Henry V, at the Public almost a generation ago, and the only concern wasn’t Mr. Braugher’s blackness but what he would make of the mythic role. (He made a great Henry.)

We’ve grown accustomed to colorblind casting over the years. Why go back in time now?

After all, it was as far back as 1936 that Orson Welles produced the first all-black Macbeth (famously known as the “Voodoo Macbeth”). And only last week, the Brooklyn Academy of Music brought us a new contemporary Arab version of Shakespeare, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy.

The only question about colorblind casting ought to be, does it work? Is the actor any good? It’s been 15 years since Nicholas Hytner—now artistic director of the National Theatre—caused a storm in a teacup in London with his celebrated Carousel, when he cast a black actor to play the adorable white character aptly named Mr. Snow.

In the end, nobody gave a damn—particularly as Clive Rowe made a swell Mr. Snow. Then again, Mr. Hytner’s Carousel at Lincoln Center upped the ante with the casting of Shirley Verrett to sing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s enduring hymn to hope and survival, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and Audra McDonald—in her breakthrough role—became the first African-American to play Carrie Pepperidge.

If Mr. Fernandez’s retrograde “blacks for black roles” were the unwritten rule, there’s abundant evidence that theater would be the worse for it. It would be an ungenerous, literal-minded place.

Are there any limits to colorblindness? There have been white Othellos (and thank God I never saw them). On the other hand, Laurence Olivier playing Othello in blackface in 1965 wouldn’t be acceptable today. (His eye-rolling performance shouldn’t have been acceptable then.)

In his letter protesting against casting Ms. Rashad as a white matriarch, Mr. Fernandez added in fairness, “I would be equally offended if a white actress was cast as Bess in Porgy and Bess, or in any of the black roles in Raisin in the Sun or August Wilson’s plays.”

But those plays and musicals are rooted in a specific black American identity born in the chains of slavery. In that sense, it would also be folly to cast a white performer to sing Ol’ Man River in Showboat. It would be an insult to history.

Here’s August Wilson in 1996 on the same topic—in reverse: “To mount an all-black production of Death of a Salesman or any other play conceived for white characters as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand.”

Wilson and Mr. Fernandez seem to agree in the separatist essentials! But Wilson, the finest dramatic poet of our time, frequently contradicted himself. His apparent separatism was a reaction against prejudice within American theater itself, coupled with his fierce desire to see black identity celebrated (not accommodated). He was dead right about the presumption of staging an all-black Death of a Salesman. But he spoke too soon.

The white director James Bundy has just staged an all-black Death of a Salesman, starring Charles S. Dutton as Willy Loman, at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven (the original home—to add insult to injury—to so many of August Wilson’s plays).

As John Lahr pointed out in The New Yorker, the fatal flaw in the production is that the loser-dreamer Willy Loman “is driven crazy by America’s obsession with winning” in an age when “this sense of expectation and entitlement was simply not shared by African–Americans in 1949.” In James Baldwin’s chilling phrase—which was repeated by August Wilson in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone—a black American was born into a society in those days, and far beyond, as “a worthless human being.”

In the age of President Obama—a theatergoer!—the politics have changed dramatically. But some things—pace Mr. Fernandez’ letter to The Times—remain stubbornly the same.

jheilpern@observer.com

Dolly has been nominated for Best Score of a Musical for the music and lyrics of 9 to 5. She isn’t going to win. I just think Dolly’s amazing.

On a less happy note, it’s arguable that the members of the Tony Award nominating committee should resign en masse. By failing to hand even a single nomination to Ian Rickson’s raved-over production of The Seagull, starring the outstanding Kristin Scott Thomas, either the doddering Tony committee has a lamentably short memory or it doesn’t know diddly from Dolly.

Four of its five Best Actress nominees are from just two plays: Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis, God of Carnage; Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter, Mary Stuart. The fifth is Jane Fonda as the valiant terminally ill heroine of 33 Variations.

No room, then, for The Seagull as Best Revival—and not for Ms. Thomas’ supreme Arkadina nor Carey Mulligan’s phenomenal performance as Nina for the Best Featured Actress category.

Twenty-five years ago in the West End, I first saw the amazing Natasha Richardson onstage: She was an ingenue then, playing the ingenue actress Nina to the Arkadina of her mother, Vanessa Redgrave. Her Nina was kissed by God and, for me, the performance has been the benchmark for the role ever since. It’s the highest compliment to say of Carey Mulligan that her blazing talent, her attack and dreaminess, reminded me of the 20-year-old Natasha Richardson.

Best Actress in a Play
Between Marcia Gay Harden and Janet McTeer-Up-the-Stage. Watch out for the heavily campaigning Jane Fonda.

Will win: Marcia Gay Harden

Best Featured Actress in a Play
Between the beloved first lady of Broadway, Angela Lansbury, for her dottily irresistible Madame Arcati in the mediocre revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, and the amazing Amanda Root for her hilariously exact portrait of British middle-class bossiness and bristling resentment in The Norman Conquests.

Will win: Angela Lansbury

Best Featured Actor in a Play
It’s a pity that, in another serious lapse by the nominating committee, John Goodman didn’t receive a nomination for the best work of his career as the sensational Pozzo in the revival of Waiting for Godot.

Will win: Roger Robinson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

If there were a best ensemble award—like the Olivier Awards have in London—the extraordinary all-British cast of The Norman Conquests would be duking it out with the extraordinary, starry all-American cast of God of Carnage. It would be a close and exciting call—and there would have been room for many other nominees in several categories.

Best Actor in a Play
A split vote between James Gandolfini and Jeff Daniels of God of Carnage. I wouldn’t rule out Mr. Gandolfini, however. I wrote of Geoffrey Rush, nominated for Exit the King, that he’s giving one of the finest virtuoso performances I’ve ever seen—but Ionesco’s absurdist romp about mortality tends to put him in the rarefied high-culture category of “He’s wonderful—but What Does It All Mean?” Then again, the gifted Raúl Esparza of Speed-the-Plow could win, though he’s in danger of becoming the Susan Lucci of the Tonys.

Will win: Geoffrey Rush

The Award for Best Play

A shoe-in. Neil LaBute’s Reasons to Be Pretty has struggled to find an audience. The late Horton Foote’s admired Dividing the Estate closed too long ago for Tony voters to have seen it. The best new play of the season—this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Ruined, by Lynn Nottage—isn’t eligible. (It’s an Off Broadway production.) Which leaves 33 Variations, the Lifetime disaster movie of the week (with a dash of Amadeus for amateur musicologists), competing with the commercial hit of the season, Yasmina Reza’s 80-minute breeze of a boulevard comedy of ill manners, God of Carnage, which the pretentious Ms. Reza mistakes for Kierkegaard.

Will win: God of Carnage

Best Actor in a Musical.

In its wisdom, the nominating committee has also ruled that Tony voters need see only one of the three boys who play Billy in Billy Elliot for all three of them to win a collective Tony as Best Actor in a Musical. When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all.

Will win: David Alvarez, Trent Kowalik and Kiril Kulish, Billy Elliot

Best Revival

The new Billy Elliot rule does not apply, however, to the revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy of plays, The Norman Conquests, which requires voters to swear on the holy bible of St. Ethel that they’ve seen all three. But the Tony for Best Revival usually goes to Lincoln Center, which makes everybody feel good about themselves except me. The Flintstones Waiting for Godot isn’t a strong contender. There’s no nomination for the admired—and now departed—Desire Under the Elms. The battle for Best Play Revival is therefore a close call between The Norman Conquests and Lincoln Center’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

Will win: The Norman Conquests

Best Director of a Play

Will win: Matthew Warchus, the most gifted director of farce on either side of the Atlantic, for The Norman Conquests

Best Musical?

Will win: Shock! Billy Elliot

Best Director of a Musical
Another shock!

Will win: Stephen Daldry, Billy Elliot!

Best Costume, Best Set Design

Prepare yourselves for Billy Elliot all night. The British mega-musical, which created the showbiz first of coal miners dancing merrily in tutus, will sweep everything in its category (including best peanuts). The only exception I can imagine is Best Costume, and possibly Best Set Design, for Shrek. (Green is good.)

Best Actress in a Musical

Will win: Alice Ripley for her suicidally depressive heroine in Next to Normal

Best Revival of a MusicaL

Finally, the Tony for Best Revival of a Musical is between the tougher, bilingual new production of West Side Story, directed by the always modest Arthur Laurents; and the vibrant, nice, clean Brazilian wax production of Hair, directed by Diane Paulus.

Let the sunshine in!

Will win, must win: Hair, beloved tribal love-rock musical of my generation!

jheilpern@observer.com

Samuel Beckett’s seminal Modernist masterpiece—first produced in America in 1956—is famously set in a void with only a near-barren tree (a Beckett tree: one too fragile upon which to hang yourself). But I felt sunk the moment the curtain went up to reveal the stage cluttered with fake rocks and boulders arranged into some kind of plastic mountain.

Meet the Flintstones Beckett. They’re the modern Stone Age family.

The Bedrock Estragon and Vladimir of Mr. Lane and Mr. Irwin are one mismatched thing. But that ill-conceived set that the veteran British director has imposed on Godot is in direct contradiction to Beckett’s stated intentions.

Mr. Page—not an innovator, but usually a faithful director of classic texts—has made a very uncharacteristic lapse. It need not have been decisive had Santo Loquasto’s Flintstone set design worked better than any old mundane cliché, or even been relevant to the essence of the great play itself.

His un-Beckettian tree is far too sturdy. You could hang yourself from it, with ease. But his rocky landscape does not convince us half as much as the rocky landscape in the new production of the elm-free Desire Under the Elms (now nicknamed Desire Under the Rocks).

The Flintstone look is in. There was also the blasted moonscape that the British director Deborah Warner added recently to Beckett’s Happy Days, starring Fiona Shaw. O Sam, poor Sam! His spartan genius has bequeathed merely mortal directors and designers too much material to work with.

Will no one leave Beckett alone?

The new production of Waiting for Godot in London’s West End, starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, for example, takes the usual populist liberties: Beckett’s empty space has now become a hackneyed derelict theater, and the two stars—never innately funny performers in the first place—relish playing clowns too much, even singing and dancing creakily at the curtain call to the old British music-hall favorite, “Underneath the Arches.”

I trust they’re having a yabba dabba doo time.

THE DEBATE ABOUT “interpreting” sacred texts isn’t new. Nor are Shakespeare productions set in, say, the Wild West (which I’ve seen twice). Everything’s been done that mediocre directors insist on being done. Still, better a living reinterpretation of a classic play than a dusty revival of a museum piece.

I believe the plays of a precise minimalist like Beckett stand apart, however. My bias is in favor of staging his masterpieces as he intended. Let the characters and the words speak for themselves—stripped to the marrow of his lost souls damned at birth, or before.

Beckett’s notes are always musically the same; it’s a question of how you play them. Apart from the wayward stage design, Mr. Page—a traditionalist at heart—has kept conventionally to Beckett’s text for the Roundabout Theatre production at Studio 54. But Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin make a distant odd couple, whereas Estragon and Vladimir ought to be joined irrevocably at the hip.

The performers are too much themselves. Mr. Lane’s popular note of wryly comic exasperation belongs to his own familiar persona rather than to Estragon’s bleakly tragic emotionalism. Mr. Irwin—a brilliant mime, of course—makes a lightweight, fussily overintellectualized version of the cerebral Vladimir, and key line readings are disjointedly bizarre.

There’s no poetry in either of them, alas—and little of Beckett’s lament for humanity. Together, they fatally lack his tragic perspective. A generalized clownishness—with a comforting nod to Beckett’s love of music hall—only touches the reassuring surfaces of the play. It’s a tragicomedy. What in all dramatic literature could be sadder or more agonizingly hopeless than the news the child brings into the wilderness each bright new day: “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t be coming this evening but surely tomorrow.”

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I’ll grant you that”—as the mordant line goes in Beckett’s Endgame. Mr. Page’s production isn’t—thank goodness—the laugh riot of the Mike Nichols knockabout 1988 Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center (in which Mr. Irwin appeared as Lucky, and Robin Williams’ Estragon performed manic impersonations of Hollywood stars, as usual). “Every line a laugh,” Beckett commented about it dryly.

But Mr. Lane and Mr. Irwin do not take us to the anguished depths—to “how it is on this bitch of an earth.” My benchmark for Godot is the Dublin Gate Theatre production with Beckett’s greatest interpreter Barry McGovern as Vladimir, along with Johnny Murphy’s Estragon. It was directed by Walter Asmus—who assisted Beckett on his own seminal production of Godot for the Schiller Theater in Berlin.

Irish actors understand Beckett, the Irishman, in their bones. And what the masterly Dublin production revealed—beside Beckett’s essential Irish gallows humor—is Godot's trust in salvation, in tandem with an awesome sorrow "where the light gleams an instant."

There are two remarkable saving graces in the new Roundabout production, however. John Goodman’s Pozzo, the fat, bullying slave-driver with a posh British accent and the temperament of a ruined child, is a fabulous echo of Peter Bull’s original blustery Pozzo of Peter Hall’s celebrated London premier of Waiting for Godot in 1955. And the excellent John Glover’s unlucky Lucky, enslaved, beaten like Ireland, barely able to walk, exhausted, dying, could scarcely be better or more affecting.

Mr. Glover and a revelatory Mr. Goodman hit all the right notes.

jheilpern@observer.com

The first, Table Manners, is my favorite. Not only is it consistently, irresistibly funny; it contains a dinner-party scene so blissfully hilarious that I was on the floor laughing.

All three plays take place during the same absurdly traumatic country-house weekend. They can be seen separately and in no particular order, but they unfold chronologically. They reveal what’s happening from different perspectives, so that when a character exits the dining room during the first play, we see what he’s really up to in the sitting room during the second (Living Together). Or for that matter, who’s failing to seduce whom in the garden during the third (Round and Round the Garden).

The prolific Mr. Ayckbourn has always been energized by solving self-inflicted puzzles. His Intimate Exchanges (1982) is eight interconnecting plays—no less—that all open with exactly the same scene. His House and Garden (1999) is notoriously two plays performed simultaneously by the same cast in adjoining theaters! (Exit the king, as it were, who then does an insane dash to appear in a scene taking place next door.)

The Norman Conquests, with its wonderful all-British cast, comes to us via the Old Vic theater and is expertly directed by Matthew Warchus (of God of Carnage and Boeing-Boeing). I saw the triptych in a single marathon day and night, and must admit that I was flagging a bit during the third play. This isn’t, after all, Das Rheingold. This is more what Tom Stoppard might describe as “the Coast of Suburbia.”

Mr. Ayckbourn, the bard of middle-class manners, is the masterful chronicler of English suburban foibles. He conveys as no other modern British playwright can—with the exception of Alan Bennett—the national identity of emotional reticence and fumbling embarrassment (or the Brits’ insatiable appetite for awkward sex in unlikely places).

His ear for the verbal tics and rhythms of the frayed bourgeois, with its quiet neurosis and lingering grievances doting on defeat, is exact. His archetypal characters are living in partially submerged hysteria. In Mr. Ayckbourn’s hands, they commit an unpardonably un-English faux pas: They fail to keep up appearances.

The premise of The Norman Conquests is deceptively close to a typically English farce like No Sex Please, We’re British. Norman, a librarian and unlikely Casanova, is unhappily married to myopic, workaholic Ruth. Norman is all set for a dirty weekend with his wan sister-in-law, the somewhat ungroomed Annie (in whose neglected Victorian house the action takes place).

Henpecked Reg—Annie’s brother and inventor of incomprehensible adaptations of Monopoly—arrives with irritable Sarah, his bossy wife (whom Norman also fancies). Plus, there’s the hopelessly shy local vet Tom, who might be a bit slow. He’s Annie’s perpetual suitor who’s always blundering in at the wrong moment.

Still, The Norman Conquests goes beyond the norms of boulevard comedy. Mr. Ayckbourn’s recent Private Fears in Public Places (2004) touchingly reveals the playwright’s real intentions—should there have been any doubt. He’s hilariously serious.

His comedies are sly portraits of human folly. But I disagree with those critics who acclaim Mr. Ayckbourn as the British Chekhov. True, Chekhov also wrote comedies set in country houses—but does that make him the Russian Alan Ayckbourn?

The Norman Conquests is by no means a tragedy. But, like all the playwright’s best work, its comedy is underpinned by unspoken yearning and unhappiness. The trilogy reveals English lives that never quite blossomed, never quite connected. The stoic Brits soldier on, as ever. Solitude and desperation within the farcical mayhem are the outcome.

And, in the best of all possible ways, it’s a daringly old-fashioned performance—the kind we feel exceptionally lucky to witness nowadays. From his first strutting entrance as Ionesco’s 400-year-old King, Mr. Rush is not only in relaxed and riveting command of the stage; he is saying—while not exactly saying—“Watch this!”

He brings to this potentially difficult role the nearly lost art and irresistible joy of performing—and makes Ionesco wonderfully accessible in the exhilarating process.

Ionesco said of his so-called theater of the absurd—The Chairs (1952) and Rhinoceros (1959) are among his other classics—that he was influenced by the Marx brothers, Grand Guignol puppet shows and Kafka. Mr. Rush gives us the disturbing and farcical essence of all three—topping them up nicely with an expert combination of music hall, circus and Shakespeare. That his Everyman King Berenger finds a tragic Shakespearean depth of human wreckage amid the hilarity is among the miracles of a masterly performance.

The demanding role was famously originated (in its English version) by Alec Guinness, but I cannot imagine even that great actor equaling Mr. Rush’s achievement. The introverted Guinness was slyly comic, whereas Mr. Rush’s huge and grotesque interpretation is exactly in tune with what Ionesco termed the “violently comic, violently dramatic.” In the exaggerated theater of the absurd, nothing is ever quite real—except the show.

Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon (Queen Marguerite) and Lauren Ambrose (playing Marie, the other Queen) are among the strong ensemble in Neil Armfield’s splendid, near childlike production. But all eyes are forgivably drawn to Mr. Rush’s bravura King. The Australian actor (also an Academy Award winner) is a born clown. He has the face and mask of one. Peeking out from his gold paper crown, his hair is revealed as startled tufts of red—until it turns white. (Shakespeare’s clowns were traditionally red-headed.)

Mr. Rush is also a gifted mime. He falls beautifully onstage (like no one else since the 73-year-old Ralph Richardson in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land). It is a slow crumpling that his decrepit, rubbery King does, like a puppet whose wires have been cut: The landing is soft; the rise speedy and limber—until the next fall.

You never know what Mr. Rush might do next. (But then, nor does the King.) After all, Exit the King takes place in a world—Ionesco’s as well as ours—where the abnormal has become the new normal. The star actor thrives on the unpredictable, dangerous edge of theater. His energy is mercurial, electric and gleeful; his despotic King ultimately pathetic and extraordinarily humane.

And the play itself? Oh, that! In hifalutin terms, Ionesco’s renowned “anti-play” at the Ethel Barrymore is theatrically akin to a Cubist painting. In plainer terms, Exit the King is about insane self-delusion and nothing less than the futility of life. It’s about death.

But don’t let that discourage you in the least. The absurdist play has stood the test of time, and Mr. Rush’s 400-year-old King is one for the ages.

Fortunately, what Ms. Reza has done with God of Carnage, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on Broadway, is to write a welcome boulevard comedy polished to a high gloss by her frequent translator, Christopher Hampton. After the soupy pretentiousness of her last outing here, The Spanish Play, Ms. Reza has returned to the successful formula of Art: a small group of politely civilized people meet, talk and, one way or another, end up trying to kill each other.

God of Carnage concerns two sets of middle-class parents who meet to resolve a violent fight that took place between their young sons in the schoolyard—and their lives unravel accordingly. Thankfully, Ms. Reza makes only fleeting allusion to the tragedy of civil war in Darfur, while her boisterous 85-minute light comedy proves a triumph of escalating farce.

The marvelously paced production confirms—if confirmation is needed—the Brit Matthew Warchus as a leading director on both sides of the Atlantic. Last season, he breathed glorious new life into what was assumed to be a dead horse with his revival of Boeing-Boeing. (He also directed the original production of Art, among other Reza plays.) But Mr. Warchus’ supreme ensemble of actors in God of Carnage is a particular delight.

The director never relies on purely comic performers for the laughter—but on fine actors who proceed to the ridiculously farcical via a considered seriousness and politesse. The terrific James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden are one hilarious couple; the equally smashing pairing of Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis are the other. The quiet riot Ms. Davis—to whom I declared undying love and adoration over a decade ago—has returned to the New York stage at last, and her astonishing projectile vomit over the entire proceedings must be seen to be believed.

jheilpern@observer.com

Ms. Fonda, furthermore, is playing a terminally ill musicologist, Dr. Katherine Brandt, who’s dying horribly of Lou Gehrig’s disease—and she still looks wonderful! In fact, she seems to grow more and more attractive the closer her increasingly frail character comes to its last gasp. From walker to wheelchair to sayonara-it’s-been-swell, the dignified, forever beautiful Ms. Fonda resolutely endures.

That is more than can be said for the play. Written and directed by Moisés Kaufman, 33 Variations is a shamelessly manipulative stew of Lifetime Movie mixed with ghoulish biopic, pseudo-historical drama, a splash of Amadeus and faux art. And all in the name of refined Highbrow Culture at the theater!

Of all the choices Mr. Kaufman might have made, why, I wonder, did he choose a heroine dying of cancer? His ailing Dr. Brandt is obsessed with solving the mystery of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, the work that obsessed the ailing composer. (Aha! They’re both sick!) She travels courageously to Germany to unlock the secret of the Variations and, in sub-Stoppardian manner, the playwright crisscrosses his drama in time, revealing Beethoven struggling for years with his ineffable “33 Variations.” (The live piano accompaniment by Diane Walsh during the action is exceptional.)

But Zach Grenier’s overripe performance as an irascible, blustery Beethoven is a loud cartoon, and Mr. Kaufman—best known for his docudramas (including The Laramie Project)—might have resisted the deaf jokes. He might also have skipped his coy—and horribly old-fashioned—romantic subplot involving Dr. Brandt’s partially estranged daughter and an emotionally dim male nurse wracked with torment about holding hands on their first date.

The intrepid Dr. Brandt’s line about Beethoven—“I didn’t know he liked soup”—only serves to remind us that the play is no Wit. Margaret Edson’s brilliant 1998 metaphysical drama of ideas, with an unforgettable performance by Kathleen Chalfant, explored a professor’s death from cancer, the life of the mind and the eternal mystery of great poetry. By comparison, I’m afraid that the arty pretensions of Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations amount to little more than showbiz.

ARE OUR TIMES too serious for Noël Coward? His patented brand of brittle flippancy for dire times is thought to be eternally witty. To sing stoically as the boat goes down is the master’s nonchalant, stiff-upper-lip credo.

“Let’s be superficial and pity the poor philosophers,” as Elyot puts it in Coward’s 1930 masterwork, Private Lives. “Let’s blow trumpets and squeakers and enjoy the party as much as we can, like small, quite idiotic schoolchildren.”

If Coward’s very idiotic 1941 Blithe Spirit were nearly as good as Private Lives, I might still be enjoying the party. But I’m not so certain that either Coward’s farce or its current revival at the Shubert Theatre are quite enough cause for celebratory trumpets and squeakers.

Michael Blakemore’s strangely subpar production opens by sending the wrong signal with a recording of “Someday I’ll Find You.” The signature Coward song from Private Lives only reminds us further of what we’re about to miss. Other musical interludes from the hallowed Coward songbook follow—accompanying quaintly captioned introductions to each big scene. But they only slow the action when it should be dancing on air—hot air—while the dated songs themselves give off the nostalgic whiff of an anemic Palm Court recital performed by three little old ladies in evening wear on a drizzly day in Frinton-on-Sea.

Coward’s self-described “very gay, very superficial comedy about a ghost” concerns marriage and infidelity, the intervention of a mad medium and a supercilious upper-class novelist who’s haunted by the ghost of his first wife (and then his second). The revival has its compensations—Angela Lansbury’s adorably nuts Madame Arcati among them—but, alas, Coward’s creaky brand of arch frivolity left me imagining a new song, titled “I’m Not So Terribly in Love With Noël Anymore.”

The master could write dialogue—as he put it happily—“by the yard,” and he wrote Blithe Spirit in six absinthe-drenched days to settle a few pressing debts. But I’m with John Gielgud (no less), who commented with customary tactlessness after seeing the show on its opening night: “I thought it was terribly overwritten. It was a good joke, but he spun it out too much.”

Mr. Blakemore—the veteran director whose production of Michael Frayn’s classic backstage farce Noises Off is legend—has faltered uncharacteristically here. Coward’s plays demand a superior carriage trade production, yet the set design of Blithe Spirit’s spiffy upper-class drawing room is forlornly drab. And Mr. Blakemore hasn’t, as yet, got the comic timing of his distinguished ensemble right. Frivolity is best taken lightly. But the pace of the piece is too labored, the comedy too broad.

Madame Arcati (the role originally played by the sublime English eccentric, Margaret Rutherford) traditionally steals the show, and Angela Lansbury’s madcap Arcati is no exception. Though very occasionally seeming uncertain, the legendary actress sails on regardless, and what appears to be her own manically balletic version of Nijinsky’s Les Noces is a riot.

But the glamorous Christine Ebersole, who possesses an innate comic flair, isn’t quite right as the ghost of the upper-class Brit, Elvira, while Jayne Atkinson’s priggish Ruth is on the earnest side. Rupert Everett, swaggering indolently about the place as supercilious Charles, is an ideal Coward actor, however. (An ideal Wildean one, too). Mr. Everett knows how to be stylishly, effortlessly superficial, as if to the manor born. Plus, he can balance a cup of tea on his knee with a piece of cake.

THERE'S JUST ROOM for a word—and a rave—about the revolutionary production of Thornton Wilder’s iconic Our Town (1938) at the Barrow Street Theatre in the Village. It’s a model of everything fine that can be achieved in a revival of a mythic play.

Its gifted director, the Chicago-based David Cromer, who also plays the Stage Manager, brought us the wonderful and modest Off Broadway musical Adding Machine last season (which reinvented Elmer Rice’s 1923 Expressionist play). Now his intimate staging of Wilder’s apparent potboiler has made the frequently staged play shatteringly fresh.

How the new production appears to exist simultaneously in time past and present is some kind of theater miracle. This is no Our Town as a comforting slice of folksy Americana. (Wilder never intended it to be that.) The production’s rhythmic, unfolding picture of small-town American life is extraordinarily real and immediate, and its abiding spirit still speaks to us. The sentiment is honestly earned; the utterly natural acting of the splendid ensemble is admirably artless.

This is a great production that takes us to the heartbeat of Thornton Wilder’s original tragic intention. And it takes us there quietly, without fuss. In its vast simplicity and force, Our Town is exhorting us all to live every minute, every second, every day of our lives as if we are blessed.

jheilpern@observer.com

If only that were true! It’s sad to report that the revival of the iconic 1950 Guys and Dolls, currently hitting us over the head with a meat cleaver at the Nederlander on Broadway, is extraordinarily disappointing. Whether the show will be a hit, only Mr. Gopnik’s penguins can say. The numbing effect it had on me was akin to listening to a fabulously witty story you adore being retold by someone with zero sense of humor.

No matter that the director, Des McAnuff (of Jersey Boys, The Who’s Tommy), has book-ended the botched production with a confusing image of Damon Runyon hunched over a typewriter, at work on—what? Guys and Dolls? The musical itself—with its hokey, fun book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, together with Frank Loesser’s gem of a score—owes only snatches of its plot directly to Runyon (except for “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown”). The show’s wellspring is the romantic old Broadway of Runyon’s lowlife guys and dolls, with their mannered argot and the elaborate politesse that gives gangsters class.

As Harry the Horse puts it to that lovable no-goodnik Nathan Detroit, “Nathan—if there is no crap game tonight I am sure Big Jule will be considerably displeased; and Big Jule does not like to be displeased, as you can find out from those citizens who at one time or another displeased him. Although I will admit it is very hard to find such citizens in view of the fact that they are no longer around and about.”

The key to any production of Guys and Dolls is the subtitle, A Musical Fable of Broadway. Yet the new production has inappropriately rooted its aggressive visual style in grim reality. The dominating gray iron trusses of set designer Robert Brill’s blighted New York cityscape are jarringly industrial. The only color I recall (apart from Paul Tazewell’s so-so costumes) is the brutalist neon signage overpowering each side of the stage and part of the auditorium.

In vividly colorful contrast, Jerry Zaks’ 1992 revival of the show—which has rightly passed into legend—was a high-water mark of stage fantasy by designer Tony Walton and his creative team. Paying tribute to the hallowed 1950 designs of Jo Mielziner and subsequently those of Oliver Smith (for the lesser 1955 screen version), Mr. Walton’s painted, Matisse-like backdrops created their own remarkable genre.

LET'S ADMIT THAT Runyon’s Manhattan never really existed. Born in Manhattan, Kan., and raised in Colorado, Runyon created a romanticized version of his adopted city; Guys and Dolls, already a step away from Runyon, is itself nostalgic for a mythic Broadway. (Well, aren’t we all?)

But any production of the show ought to have a certain style and period. This one’s a mess: The busy video work is contemporary, the props period, and the cityscape images are loudly pro-forma archival. The costumes appear to be 1930s, but Sergio Trujillo’s tense choreography presents a fiercely contemporary attitude.

The unfocused production, which ought to be easeful, assaults the audience. It’s oversold, overproduced and overmiked. The brassy sound of the hidden onstage orchestra is at times ramped up way too loud. Yet Frank Loesser’s unmatchable score possesses an innate street vitality that should speak (and sing and swoon) for itself.

Is there anywhere a lyric to beat “Adelaide’s Lament,” Loesser’s paean to curing a psychosomatic cold? “You can spray her wherever/ You figure the streptococci lurk/ You can give her a shot for whatever she’s got/ But it just won’t work.”

To be reminded of the title of more or less any Guys and Dolls song is to want to sing it:

Yes sir!

When you see a guy,

Reach for the stars in the sky,

You can bet that he’s doing it for some doll …

The wit of the Swerling-Burrows book keeps pace with Loesser. “If she hears I am running the crap game she will never set foot on me again.” “Don’t worry, honey—one of these days I’ll be in the money, and you’ll have more mink than a mink.” “She give a look that would have cooled off a moose at mating time.” “Yes, it’s too bad that a smart businessman like Nathan had to go and fall in love with his own fiancée.”

Too bad also that so much of the dialogue is recited as if the cast were struggling with a foreign language. I’m not at all certain that a performer needs to be a born musical comedian to shine in Guys and Dolls. (Sam Levene made his musical debut playing Nathan Detroit in the 1950 production; a successful 1982 National Theatre production used well-known actors.) But the quartet of performers in the engine room of the current revival isn’t sparking at all.

Oliver Platt—a favorite of mine who rarely fails to do interesting work—isn’t at his relaxed best as Nathan Detroit. When Nathan confesses he’s a heel, you’re too ready to believe him. Mr. Platt sings pleasantly and is touching in that plea bargain for love, “Sue Me” (“So sue me, sue me/ What can you do me/ I love you”). But his flair for light comedy isn’t the equal of his talent for playing desperate lost souls.

His subdued partnership with Lauren Graham’s Miss Adelaide—“the well-known fiancée”—is off-kilter. Ms. Graham (Lorelai Gilmore on the WB’s Gilmore Girls) is making her Broadway debut. We wish her well. She’s game, but she’s too pretty for the role, hits all the right notes in the wrong way and cannot read a comic lyric. I regret to say that Ms. Graham is no Adelaide.

Craig Bierko (of The Music Man revival) has his fans, and he makes a passable Sky Masterson. But he’s fatally unexciting. His awkwardly staged romantic duets with Kate Jennings Grant’s earnest and shrill Sister Sarah look strained. He makes the wonderful lyric about the quickening infatuation of falling in love—“But this is wine that’s all too strange and strong/ I’m full of foolish song”—seem bland.

There aren’t enough bruised noses among the ensemble of Runyonesque characters—least of all on the appealing baby face of Tituss Burgess’ Nicely-Nicely Johnson, who finishes “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” on a scream-out with Mary Testa’s gospelling General. Surprisingly few members of the cast possess a natural comic persona—Ms. Testa, who creates something out of practically nothing in her cameo role, is one of them.

PERHAPS WE exaggerate the virtues of great musicals we recall from the past, but I’m far from alone in thinking that the Guys and Dolls of 1992 was a benchmark. It introduced us to a new musical star, Faith Prince (as an irresistibly funny Adelaide), with Nathan Lane—in a partnership made in heaven—as her hapless Nathan Detroit. “No doubt another Broadway generation will one day find a different, equally exciting way to re-imagine this classic,” Frank Rich concluded his review in The New York Times. “But in our lifetime? Don’t bet on it.”

Big Frank was right: I’d rather bet even money on some guy taking a missionary doll to Havana.

jheilpern@observer.com

Definition: To act melodramatically; overact; ham it up.

We’ve all seen actors chew the scenery from time to time. It goes with the territory. But how many of us can claim to have seen an actor actually gnaw on a set?

My thanks to the Tony Award–winning Denis O’Hare for providing a first in my theatergoing lifetime. Playing the tortured, frustrated Vanya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Classic Stage Company, Mr. O’Hare no doubt wished to convey his thwarted desire for the young and beautiful—and married—Yelena (Maggie Gyllenhaal). True, he’d been hamming it up all night.

Expression: Chew the scenery.

Definition: To act melodramatically; overact; ham it up.

We’ve all seen actors chew the scenery from time to time. It goes with the territory. But how many of us can claim to have seen an actor actually gnaw on a set?

My thanks to the Tony Award–winning Denis O’Hare for providing a first in my theatergoing lifetime. Playing the tortured, frustrated Vanya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Classic Stage Company, Mr. O’Hare no doubt wished to convey his thwarted desire for the young and beautiful—and married—Yelena (Maggie Gyllenhaal). True, he’d been hamming it up all night. But when he gnawed on a wooden pillar of Santo Loquasto’s cramped set, I could have kissed him.

Mr. O’Hare made theater history for me, and I can never take that away from him. Furthermore, he made an agitated grrrrrr sound as he chomped on the pillar, and I don’t blame him one bit. The pillar was blocking the view (as were the other pillars). Did Mr. O’Hare—the uncharitable thought occurred to me—grow so maniacally frustrated with the set that he decided to eat it?

While there’s no weirder symbol of Austin Pendleton’s hyperactive, utterly un-Chekhovian production of Uncle Vanya than Mr. O’Hare sinking his teeth into the woodwork, the set design by the usually excellent Mr. Loquasto is an expensive blunder.

The three-sided stage at the intimate CSC has always been awkwardly confined. But the designer’s overstuffed set, divided up by those obtrusive pillars, only serves to cramp the playing area even more. Intended to represent the Serebryakov estate—with its 26-room house—the structure Mr. Loquasto built is more like a claustrophobic log cabin. There’s no sense of air or the outdoors, though Act I takes place entirely in the garden. (Chekhov subtitled the play “Scenes From Country Life.”)

Mr. Loquasto’s cumbersome set is also two-tiered, giving the production height instead of depth. Yet the upper rooms are rarely used by the director—and when they are, the clumsy outcome is the very thing Chekhov’s stage naturalism opposed. Thus Yelena traipses self-consciously up the staircase, and all the way down again, in order to say to Astrov, “I’m taking this pencil to remember you by.”

THIS Uncle Vanya proves again that star actors (principally Ms. Gyllenhaal and her partner, Peter Sarsgaard) are no guarantee of artistic success. (The starry Hedda Gabler at the Roundabout with the monotone Mary-Louise Parker makes the same point.) Ms. Gyllenhaal, better known for her film work, possesses too little stage experience to create a convincing portrait of Yelena’s tedium and corrosive vapidity.

Her voice, for one thing, crucially lacks tone and emotional range. She’s too preoccupied with being languid, and she’s inappropriately touchy-feely with more or less everyone around her. (The unhappily married, bewitching Yelena is not the sort of lady who snuggles.)

All actors have something in common with Chekhov’s Russian characters: They laugh and cry easily. And yet I’ve never seen a weepier Uncle Vanya than this one. (Isn’t the golden acting rule to let the audience do the weeping?) Ms. Gyllenhaal, I’m afraid, is the worst offender: She appears to be crying and laughing simultaneously—you can’t always tell the difference. She’s giving an ingratiating performance.

But with one outstanding exception (Mamie Gummer’s delightful Sonya), everyone in Mr. Pendleton’s wayward production is melodramatically out of sync. I admired Mr. Sarsgaard’s insinuating, spiritually dead Trigorin in the recent Seagull, but his 37-year-old Dr. Astrov is less the embittered crusading conservationist who sees through everyone (including himself) and more a grungy, confused adolescent with a crush. An excellent stage actor, Mr. Sarsgaard has yet to find the Astrov whose love for the idle beauty Yelena—for the superficial—is a lost cause.

But then, we have that elderly professorial buffoon Serebryakov (Yelena’s lucky husband), played in his opening scene by George Morfogen as if he were a gouty Methuselah, and in his later scenes as if he’d taken a miracle youth drug.

Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is about lives lived out in anomie, desperation and crushing isolation. It’s about the slow dawning of self-knowledge, and it’s about acceptance. With its contemporary American style wrapped in period costume, the broad new production scarcely conveys the nuances of the great play—and its middle-to-upper-class milieu not at all.

Though Mamie Gummer’s performance is also affected by the contagious weepiness, thank goodness for the compensation of her fine and openhearted Sonya. She delivers the play’s famous closing speech about endurance and hope beautifully: “And we shall find peace. We shall, Uncle, I believe it with all my heart and soul. …”

I’ve seen this young, immensely gifted actress two or three times now, and each time I’m struck by the honest reality of her work. Ms. Gummer is a stage natural with a glorious future. The time surely can’t be far off when we can stop pointing out that she’s the daughter of Meryl Streep.

WILL FERRELL’s You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George W. Bush has arrived on Broadway about three years too late. Not that it makes any difference to Mr. Ferrell’s fans, who’ve turned the critic-proof show into a major hit. Besides, the likable star makes a wonderfully deadpan George Bush onstage, just as he makes a wonderfully deadpan doofus in his popular movies.

Or, as the 43rd president announces happily when he’s winched onto the stage of the Cort Theatre from a helicopter at the start, “I said to the pilot, why don’t you drop me in the faggy Theater District—and that’s what he did!”

You’re Welcome America, written by Mr. Ferrell and slickly directed by Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights), is an extended—sometimes overextended—Saturday Night Live sketch, with a guest appearance from a lap-dancing Condoleezza Rice (Pia Glenn).

This is a President Bush who calls President Obama “the Tiger Woods guy.” A giant projection of what he sweetly calls “my penis” appears on a screen: “That’s what I call shock and awe right there!”

You get the frat message? But the saving grace of the uneven show is the masterly cool of Mr. Ferrell’s stage debut. He effortlessly captures President Bush’s peculiar combo platter of simmering peevishness and faux Texan swagger. One of the show’s funniest moments has the young and incompetent George trapped down a mine shaft with his father. “Why are you the only one in the family who talks with a Texas accent?” Poppy protests. “It makes no sense!”

Another hilariously surreal comic riff involves a covert army of highly trained monkeys with spear guns who’ve been recruited to fight insurgent Iraqis and entertain children.

It must be said that as cutting-edge political humor goes, it went. The show is satirically toothless. Mr. Ferrell’s targets (including Rummy, Condi and poor old Brownie) are easy, familiar prey, his Bush impersonation fond, nostalgic and even comforting. But when he asked us, in all righteously embarrassing seriousness, for a minute’s silence for our fallen troops in Iraq—and received it—I no longer knew who was doing the asking, George Bush or Will Ferrell, and found myself wishing I was someplace else.

You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George Bush is to be televised live as an HBO special in March.

jheilpern@observer.com

Hedda Gabler is apparently the only play that Henrik Ibsen ever wrote. While the derided revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company could be a final nail in Hedda’s coffin, I wouldn’t bank on it. The new production, starring Mary-Louise Parker, is the fourth to be staged in New York in recent memory.

Elizabeth Marvel’s histrionic Hedda was a downtown nutjob in Ivo van Hove’s chic modernist reinterpretation.

Has a play ever been revived with more alarming frequency than Hedda Gabler (1890)? As Ibsen’s ghost was heard protesting in Kristiania, Norway, only last weekend: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

Hedda Gabler is apparently the only play that Henrik Ibsen ever wrote. While the derided revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company could be a final nail in Hedda’s coffin, I wouldn’t bank on it. The new production, starring Mary-Louise Parker, is the fourth to be staged in New York in recent memory.

Elizabeth Marvel’s histrionic Hedda was a downtown nutjob in Ivo van Hove’s chic modernist reinterpretation. Cate Blanchett’s period version was fascinating, an icy portrait of a willful narcissist—until, for some wayward reason, she decided to play it for laughs, ending on a pratfall. Kate Burton’s portrait flippantly reduced Ibsen’s impossibly demanding role to mere bourgeois ordinariness.

And Ms. Parker? I’m afraid that this gifted, intelligent actress has either been woefully misdirected by Ian Rickson, or she’s overreached. Nothing in her distinguished stage biography of contemporary plays (Prelude to a Kiss, Reckless, Proof) suggests that she possesses any experience in playing classic roles. She’s a modern actress giving us a modern Hedda in showy period costume. Although Ms. Parker has repeatedly revealed a talent for wide-eyed innocence, Hedda’s mercurial capacity for destructive boredom is beyond her.

The startlingly inappropriate (and embarrassing) opening image of Mr. Rickson’s production sends all the wrong signals: Ms. Parker’s sleepy Hedda is posed languorously on a sofa under a kind of bistro mirror with her frilly underclothes hitched above her bare bum. It’s very soft porn: Hedda Gabler as calendar girl.

What on earth were they thinking?

Ibsen’s neurotic Victorian heroine who’s thrown her life away on a marriage of suffocating respectability to a lapdog is many things: a cruel, untrustworthy egotist; a mysterious pampered beauty; a tragically trapped female; an emotionally unevolved woman; a proto-feminist sans courage. Eva Le Gallienne (Ibsen’s champion and translator in the 1920s) believed that the only brave thing Hedda ever did was to shoot herself.

One thing she isn’t is sexy (or cheap). She denies her own sexuality in her frigid, sublimated marriage to the doting Tesman. Ms. Parker’s scene of stolen kisses and heavy groping with Lovborg (the love Hedda spurned) is another serious miscalculation by the director in the cause of updating Ibsen. Sex isn’t what Hedda wants, but ownership. Her powerlessness motivates her to ruin lives.

Ms. Parker’s porcelain version sputters hesitantly between a petulant adolescent on Valium and a bitch goddess who’s been foiled. (At one low point, she literally hisses.) It’s as if Ian Rickson had given up trying to unlock the play’s purpose or point. The frequent musical interludes (the moody sounds of P. J. Harvey) only remind us of the production’s lack of authentic drama. The sluggish pace and terribly uneven ensemble work (including uncomfortable, broad performances from Peter Stormare and Michael Cerveris) are untypical of the British director who recently gave us the wonderful, measured revival of The Seagull. He renewed the Chekhov; Ibsen has left him drowning at sea.

Christopher Shinn (a fine American playwright, author of the psychological drama Dying City) “adapted” Hedda Gabler for this production. Either a great play has become an old potboiler, and will forevermore be in need of modernizing (in which case I don’t think Mr. Shinn radicalized it nearly enough), or poor old Ibsen should be left in peace to speak for himself for a change.

And here he is—doing that very thing! His aggrieved ghost has just informed me that he doesn’t think Mr. Shinn should have cut Hedda’s vision of beautiful Lovborg “with vine leaves in his hair.”

“I kind of liked the line,” Ibsen tells me. “But what do I know?”

THERE'S A KEY line—which has survived!—in the loving revival of Brian Friel’s 1979 Aristocrats at the invaluable Irish Repertory Theatre. The famously Chekhovian play about identity and loss is concerned with how we’re all the authors and actors of our own fictions: Telling stories helps us deal with the hurt that life brings us.

But Mr. Friel’s outsider Eamon sees through the consoling escapism of his Ballybeg family in their crumbling house on the hill. The fantasies of the delusional Casimir, in particular, possess what Eamon memorably describes as “the authentic ring of phony fiction.”

I jumped when I heard that line. It’s how I feel about the well-regarded plays of Richard Greenberg (Take Me Out, Three Days in Rain). The current revival at the Manhattan Theatre Club of Thwe American Plan (1990) provides a vivid example of his prodigious articulacy. Whereas the unpretentious Mr. Friel is a natural poet, Mr. Greenberg’s self-conscious literary dramas always strike me as on the verge.

The American Plan—inspired by Henry James’ Washington Square, along with a splash of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie—is archly poetic. It’s scattershot and overwritten, striving for effect. You sense too much that Mr. Greenberg is making it up as he goes along.

The play has “the authentic ring of phony fiction.” And yet its beguiling opening scenes between the mentally fragile 20-year-old fantasist, Lili (played by the super Lily Rabe), and her unexpected visitor from across the lake—a “gentleman caller,” you might say—promises far better things than the breathless romance that Mr. Greenberg went on to write.

Whimsical Lili and her overbearing mother, Eva, a wealthy German-Jewish Holocaust survivor (played a shade too likably by Mercedes Ruehl), are spending the summer of 1960 in the family house across the lake from a Catskill resort. The first visitor, dashing Nick Lockridge, with whom Lili falls wildly, needily in love, is a liar, but not a good one. The second visitor, dashing Gil Harbinson, is a good liar.

Spoiler alert! Revelation follows upon revelation as Mr. Greenberg piles on the following:

Nick might be a homosexual who once had a fling with the homosexual Gil. Nick and the hapless Lili have decided to marry. Gil—it transpires—has become engaged to Nick’s former girlfriend, an heiress. But he seems likely to persuade the tempted Nick to run off with him in the moonlight. Lili doesn’t know about this. Her mother knows everything. You can’t put much past Eva.

“I feel that illusion of limitlessness, that challenge to embark … to sail to immerse oneself in an element for which one is not naturally, not physiologically, equipped.”

“We aren’t an eccentric family, just a little giddy around the circumference.”

“Nothing’s ever happened in my life. I’m a man who crosses moats.”

Who talks like this, except for Mr. Greenberg’s “poetic” mouthpieces and Henry James impersonators?

The American Plan is directed by another British director, David Grindley, at a stately, deeply respectful pace.

jheilpern@observer.com