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

Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, from a screenplay by Jenny Lumet, is said to have been inspired by Robert Altman’s satirically free-wheeling A Wedding (1978), and probably by Ms. Lumet’s own experiences in an interracial family. As far as I’m concerned, weddings in movies tend to be guilty until proven innocent or even intelligent. Ever since the old Production Code was scrapped to allow last-minute mischief at the altar, as in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) and P. J. Hogan’s My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), it has been open season on brides and grooms and best men and maids of honor.

There is little lasting mischief afoot in Rachel Getting Married, and almost no clashes of elective affinities. The only complication is Rachel’s self-dramatizing sister, Anne Hathaway’s Kym, let out of rehab briefly to attend the wedding. What backstory there is tells us that Kym, while she was a drug-addicted alcoholic, drove her car into a river, and caused her baby brother, strapped in his car seat, to be drowned. She has never gotten over it, but who to blame? Her mother, Abby (the ever delectable Debra Winger), for letting Kym take care of her baby brother in her unreliable condition. Kym and Abby have a mini-confrontation over the issue, but Abby calmly insists that Kym was always very good with her baby brother.

We never learn exactly why Abby is now divorced from her former spouse, Bill Irwin’s Paul, who is now married to African-American Anna Deavere Smith’s Carol, who has remarkably little to do in the narrative. For that matter, Rosemary DeWitt’s Rachel is happily marrying African-American Tunde Adebimpe’s Sidney, and little fuss or tension is provoked by this interracial union.

If there is one performer who stands out in this amiably disjointed production, it is the magical Ms. Winger, whose imperturbably detached demeanor slams the lid on all the incipient hysteria arising from the lifelong feud of two sisters, Rachel and Kym, over the love and attention given to the other by their parents—never enough for Rachel, and too much for Kym.

Mr. Demme has cast his wedding party, 60 or more strong, and its musicians with family and industry friends, and apparently instructed them to cut loose with a sustained burst of benevolent good cheer. Mr. Demme has a big heart and a clear-headed commitment to humanitarian causes, expressed throughout his career with both fictional and nonfictional productions, many concerned with the popular music of his time, as well as the sufferings of people around the world.

Hence, I feel a little guilty in wishing that he had sprinkled a little more emotional dissonance into a narrative caught up in a swirl of love and tolerance and multiracial and multicultural musical frenzy. One wishes we loved each other as much as Mr. Demme loves all his friends and collaborators. Unfortunately, we don’t, as the daily headlines and television bulletins tell us every hour of the day. I hope nonetheless that Rachel Getting Married is enough of a hit to sustain his career of cinematic good works. And I hope also that Ms. Winger gets a long overdue Oscar for best supporting actress, as she is that without a doubt.

asarris@observer.com

After dazzling tough film festival audiences in Venice and Toronto, Jonathan Demme’s pulsating new film Rachel Getting Married has arrived on the fall movie scene to remind me what real movies are still all about. Up to my eyeballs in draggy, shapeless amateur junk, I am genuinely thrilled to welcome a film this colorful, artistically realized and wonderfully alive. Steeped in the tradition of sound narrative form yet scrappy and unpredictable, acted and written with enormous style but with front and back doors open to experiment and surprise, it’s a film that challenges you to keep a jogger’s pace to keep up with it, then leaves you breathless. With three more months to go, Rachel Getting Married is already high on my 10-best list for 2008.

Designed and executed by the accomplished Mr. Demme (a far cry from Silence of the Lambs but every bit as polished), it has obviously been conceived as a loving homage to one of his favorite directors, Robert Altman.  With its rambling plot carved from the minutiae of details, its overpopulated landscape of neurotic characters, its speeded-up handheld camera tricks and its overlapping music and dialogue, Rachel Getting Married cannot fail to remind you of every Altman, from Nashville to A Wedding, but I didn’t find it as annoying and self-indulgent as those films, and to my taste, it’s a great deal more engaging. It is also about 100 times better than last year’s obnoxious dysfunctional wedding fiasco, Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding. Like Altman, Mr. Demme uses a chaotic wedding to paint a vast canvas of human struggle in conventional brush strokes so deceptively normal that their eccentricity almost appears mundane. But unlike Altman, the result is a rich, sprawling free-for-all that is always lucid. I often left Altman films frustrated after missing about half of the dialogue. In Rachel Getting Married, I heard every word of what everyone was saying, even when the screen was filled with people and they were all talking at the same time. This is good, because the words are wisely overheard and you will want to hear them all. The writer is Jenny Lumet, a profound new talent with good genes: Her father is Sidney Lumet and her grandmother is the legendary Lena Horne. The genes pay off. She doesn’t waste any of your valuable time in unraveling the hectic story of a big, noisy, hectic interracial wedding weekend at the home of the bride’s dysfunctional family in Connecticut. Rachel, the smart, sensitive bride-to-be, has a full plate already, but the crowning blow to an already over-planned and budget-busting event that threatens to go ballistic with every delivery truck is the sudden arrival of her neurotic, sarcastic sister Kym (a career-defining performance by Anne Hathaway, in a 90-degree turn from her charming role in The Devil Wears Prada), who has just been released from her latest nine-month stint in drug rehab. Before Kym can unpack her bags, her insecurity at the family table and her constant need to be the center of attention vault her immediately in the direction of trouble when she has sex in the attic with the groom’s best man, also a recovering addict. (They met in the 12-step program, which doesn’t seem to be working.)

There’s nothing funny about drug addiction, but Mr. Demme explores the subject with warmth, affection, music and humor as Kym wreaks havoc on the wedding. Sweet, long-suffering sister Rachel (an equally excellent Rosemarie DeWitt) has her own sibling-rivalry issues, and their divorced parents (Debra Winger and Bill Irwin) have never recovered from the automobile accident that killed their only son and left the family in broken shreds—a fatal crash that was Kym’s fault. Although the family is color-blind (Dad is already remarried to a black wife of his own), it’s no secret that Mom (Winger)—also remarried, to a younger man everyone hates—is emotionally distant in the presence of her two daughters and awkwardly resistant to accepting the groom’s black relatives into the fold of her rich, white, liberal New England fold. Kym is a drama queen who is not about to let a thing like her sister’s wedding detract from her Chekhovian suffering, or the guilt over her little brother’s death. When Rachel announces just before the wedding that she is pregnant, Kym is so angry at being upstaged that she lets loose an emotional armory of verbal artillery. Then, in one of the film’s best scenes, years of festering fury are unleashed when Kym and her mother punch each other out the night before the wedding like Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey at the Polo Grounds, then Kym smashes her father’s station wagon. The doofus dad juggles every crisis by dishing up another meat loaf. All of them are paddle boats without rudders, looking for moorings.

Mr. Demme keeps the action and the subterfuge balanced with innumerable toasts; an unconventional ceremony with the groom (Tunde Adebimpe) singing Neil Young after the vows; and a wedding reception featuring an eclectic musical soundtrack of fusion that encompasses Mendelssohn, rock ’n’ roll, African drums, Brazilian sambas, afro-Cuban jazz and belly dancers. The characters are complex and the fragmented scenes move fast, but Mr. Demme’s cameras follow them, almost in sync, moving in and out at odd angles. Very few camera movements were blocked in advance, and some of the unexpected footage was captured by one of the wedding guests, played by veteran B-movie director Roger Corman. There’s a lot to see and hear, but you miss nothing. Not a single nuance goes overlooked in a catastrophic family reunion filled with threads of trust and reconciliation between parents, children and friends desperately trying to fly a flag of truce, at least for the weekend. Anne Hathaway is a stunning mixture of pain, frustration, self-absorption and acid one-liners, while everyone spins around her trying to love her unconditionally. The one thing Rachel Getting Married never runs out of is energy. It is profound, truthful, unforgettable magic at the movies.

rreed@observer.com

The big plus of the festival is that we get to graze so generous a smorgasbord of dance, ranging from the famous to the obscure, without leaving home (that is, the City Center). It’s a (carefully structured) free-for-all. The big minus is that if you put on 30 pieces, a lot of them are going to be worthless. (Another plus, of course, is the $10 admission price—the most galvanizing aspect of the entire venture—but we critics, who come as guests, get only vicarious satisfaction from that.)

The most important thing about the festival is that we’re faced with the entire spectrum of contemporary dance: ballet, modern, ethnic, acrobatic, multimedia—you name it. There’s no dodging Black Grace’s “union of contemporary movement and Fa’ataupati (Samoan slap dance) traditional dance styles.” Or Tania Isaac Dance, Tania Isaac artistic director, text by Tania Isaac, performed by Tania Isaac (“a physically explosive, sensual marriage of Modern and Caribbean esthetics,” actually a one-woman festival of self-indulgent exhibitionism); or the Tania Pérez-Salas Compañía de Danza, from Mexico City, whose Las Horas climaxes with four girls dangling from ropes (a fifth girl is out of luck—her rope doesn’t make it all the way down from the flies). Think Cirque du Soleil, only in Spanish.

The hit of the first night, not unexpectedly, was a new solo by New York’s favorite Bill Irwin & Friends, the “friends” being a suitcase full of clothes and a TV monitor. We knew Irwin was funny, we knew he could act, but we—or at least I—didn’t know what a capable dancer he was. Untitled is a very funny skit, a parody of so much that’s silly in today’s dance. Irwin’s a dancing fool. He’s got the moves. In Untitled, he has internalized—and externalized—Buster Keaton, though I also detect an occasional flash of Eddie Cantor eyes. He keeps adding new clothes to the ones he’s already got on, including bigger and bigger shoes. It’s vaudeville. And when he gets to the Seven Ages of Man, he shows more edge than we’re accustomed to from the always-amiable Bill. This is a piece that’s going to be in demand at galas and benefits forever, and Bill Irwin is clearly a nice enough guy to give us what we want.

Philadanco (the Philadelphia Dance Company) brought in Gate Keepers, another of those semi-spiritual-but-right-on Ronald K. Brown extravaganzas. It’s all very Ailey, but not as good as the terrific Grace that he made for Ailey. It aims high, the dancers go for broke, but in this case, good intentions pave the way not to Hell but to a highly amorphous, undifferentiated Heaven.

A bizarre touch came from Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance. Sperling—artistic director and performer— reconstructed, or imagined, two dances by Loie Fuller, that Art Nouveau icon who a century ago dazzled the crowned heads of Europe with her revolutionary manipulations of fabric and light. Fuller was a phenomenon—a pioneer of science if not of dance—but I don’t think she’d get very far today. Jody Sperling’s dilutions are fascinating, even beautiful, for about two minutes, but even the most elaborate and inventive swirlings of huge wings of white cloth, subtly lit, quickly begin to demonstrate the fatal law of diminishing returns. We’ll draw a discreet veil over the onstage pianist’s dim renditions of Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l’Océan” and de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance,” but attention must be paid to Sperling’s curtain calls, during which she never abandoned her molto serioso Loie persona. She’s a believer.

When the Limón Dance Company performed José Limón’s Psalm last year at the Joyce, I paid tribute to its high moral earnestness and was bemused by its High Modern aura, it’s so obviously a direct descendent of the Martha Graham–Doris Humphrey take on life. (Limón was, indeed, Humphrey’s great disciple.) Although, this time round, the virtues of Psalm were still apparent, I’m afraid its considerable length was even more so. Part of the problem is that this late Limón piece (it’s from 1967, though it had different music back then) was a star vehicle, and there’s no one in the current company of Limón’s stature. Good dancers, yes, but charismatic giants, no. Neither Robert Regala, a year ago, nor Raphaël Boumaïla today—and they’re both excellent dancers—can motor Psalm; they’re incidents in it, not its raison d’être.

What are we left with? The Houston Ballet, under the direction of the Australian Stanton Welch, turned in a Welch classical ballet called Nosotros—Spanish, I believe, for “Us.” (At last, pointe shoes!) A few years ago, Welch ballets were turning up everywhere—slick and mostly empty. This one is no better. Everyone’s in glam evening wear, the women’s gowns almost to the floor (which makes for some scary moments). The backdrop is a black sky, perforated by stars that keep changing color. Remember Robbins’ In the Night? That had three couples dancing beneath the stars; this has 11. But eight more isn’t eight better. In the Night was super-romantic, notably in its soaring, schmaltzy lifts. Welch’s lifts go way, way beyond mere schmaltz, and they’re inexorable—when the 11th ballerina is hoisted up, flung around and plunged to the ground, you can only hope they’ve all been issued Dramamine. The music—Rachmaninoff’s irritating Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini—is an enabler. Except when Welch brings everyone on together in a messy finale—why are finales so hard for young choreographers?—he isn’t incompetent. He’s just unoriginal and without taste. But his dancers are attractive even if they’re not ultra-strong, and it would be good to see them dancing to a different tune.

It was a pleasure to see two fine dancers, Amandine François—particularly supple and full—and Dorothée Delabie, in William Forsythe’s Duo, as performed by the Ballet de l’Opéra National de Lyon. Forsythe is always intelligent, and his ballet background helps. But in this piece, the two women—whose breasts, for some reason, are prominently exposed through black netting—shadow each other in intricate movements that just go on too long. What was heartening was the quickness, the lightness, the authority of the dancing. I hope and trust that François and Delabie are representative of the Lyon company’s style.

Finally, a happy surprise: from India, the Aditi Mangaldas Dance Company. Five dancers and two percussionists explore the relationship of sound to dance, the slap of the dancers’ feet brilliantly in counterpoint to the slap of the drummers’ hands. Mangaldas, a compact whirlwind, is the choreographer and lead dancer. I wouldn’t have thought that a barefoot dancer could have such virtuoso allegro technique, but that’s what she has. She and her colleagues flatten their feet and use them the way tappers use taps, and they’re just as quick. Here was joyous invention performed with strict discipline. This is the kind of event that justifies Fall for Dance.

As for what I’m missing, I can’t pretend to be sorry about Ailey’s Cry or A.B.T.’s Spectre de la Rose or NYCB’s Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir or the Joffrey’s Suite Saint-Saëns (you can say for Gerald Arpino that he’s a survivor) or Pascal Rioult’s Bolero (anyone’s Bolero). But Vincent Mantsoe? Tapage? Zaccho Dance Theatre? Keigwin + Company? Yoshiko Chuma & The School of Hard Knocks? I’ll have to depend on the kindness of colleagues to keep me posted.

When the shocking play premiered in 1962, it was said to belong to the Theater of the Absurd, which itself was an absurd claim. Mr. Albee's antecedents here are Strindberg and O'Neill. But O'Neill believed in pipe dreams, whereas Mr. Albee mercilessly strips away all illusions. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is "A Long Day's Journey into Booze." No bigger character has been invented for the modern stage than the monstrous Martha. Yet this bullying, foul woman is unexpectedly funny. For one witty thing, Mr. Albee has given her one of the great theatrical lines. "You're all flops," Martha announces with a flourish. "I am the Earth Mother, and you're all flops!"

All men-disappointing husbands, crummy lovers, the world itself-are great big flops. "I disgust me …, " Martha then adds witheringly. It could be prissily said that Mr. Albee's devouring heroine isn't too flattering to those delicate, pretty things called women. But his intention isn't to flatter anyone-including his soulless, embittered men.

Booze has always been useful in plays. It loosens tongues. Who's Afraid of… is a drunken New England faculty bitchfest between the grotesque, domineering president's daughter, Martha-"My arm has got tired whipping you!"-and her younger husband George, who's a failed middle-aged historian. Two late-night faculty guests of theirs, the newly married Nick and Honey, become their prey-easy meat for vindictive, disappointed people. Nick, the ambitious, shallow biology professor, and Honey, his unhappy, well-connected wife-who's already drowning herself in brandy-are embryo versions of George and Martha.

The opening words of the play are symptomatic of the marital blood sport to follow, a warm-up to an eternal double act.

"Jesus," Martha snarls as they enter their home at 2 a.m.

"Shhhhhh …, " says the defensive George.

"What a dump," she adds, looking round her own living room, imitating Bette Davis.

"WHAT'S IT FROM, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE?" she yells to her husband about the line.

But George hasn't a clue.

"Dumbbell! It's from some goddamn Bette Davis picture ... some goddamn Warner Bros. epic."

(Note to cineastes: "What a dump"-Beyond the Forest, 1949).

The games have begun. They keep their marriage alive. Nobody escapes the lacerating truths the games reveal. Who's Afraid of … isn't a pleasant play. Look at the names Martha and George give their degrading games, like nasty, insulting party tricks: "Get the Guests," ''Hump the Hostess," "Humiliate the Host" and the most dangerously personal of all, "Bringing Up Baby."

"Bringing Up Baby" represents the ultimate showdown between Martha and George, and it's about their secret, imaginary son. Some have argued that the son is real. But there's no reason why we shouldn't take them at their word. The imagined child symbolically avoids the truth about their barren marriage.

We would expect Ms. Turner to be comfortably brassy. But as Martha, she's unembarrassed and emotionally naked. She's scorchingly honest in all she does. I never saw Uta Hagen's legendary Martha. But it would be hard to imagine a better one than Miss Turner's. Her striking achievement is to reveal within Martha's ugly, vast disappointment a form of love. The horrible, touching truth is that George and Martha love each other.

Their bloodletting games of mutual loathing subside in the best speech in the play, and Ms. Turner delivers it to quiet, stunning effect:

"George who is good to me, and whom I revile; who understands me, and whom I push off; who can make me laugh, and I choke it back in my throat; who can hold me at night, so that it's warm, and whom I will bite so there's blood, who keeps learning the games we play as quickly as I can change the rules; who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy, and yes I do wish to be happy. George and Martha: sad, sad, sad."

But as I say with regrets, Mr. Irwin's George is no match for Ms. Turner's Martha, who could eat him alive for breakfast (and practically does). It's said that Mr. Albee personally cast Mr. Irwin in the role. If so, it's a classic example of even the most distinguished playwrights not knowing what's best for them.

The actor is well known, of course, for his virtuoso performances as a meek and hapless whiteface clown. I've seen him play Beckett's Texts for Nothing, but I wrote at the time that words-and streams of words, at that-aren't Mr. Irwin's strength. I missed his admired performance in Mr. Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, when he took over the role of the happily married man who falls in love with a flirtatious goat. The art of playing deadpan would have served him well.

But his George in Who's Afraid of … is too unconvincingly slight. It isn't a question of Mr. Irwin's natural meekness and good nature. But his clenched-jaw resentment is no substitute for real, live danger. He makes the line "I could rip you to pieces" seem like mere petulance. You've only to watch 10 minutes of Richard Burton's George in the 1966 Mike Nichols film version of the play to see the profound difference. For once, the shrillness of the almost miscast Elizabeth Taylor is appropriate, but the snarling seediness of Burton rings painfully true. His portrait of failure and disappointed hopes is found in his predatory self-loathing.

We ought to change sides a lot in the battles between George and Martha, but we can't if the fight is unequal. Mr. Irwin lacks the necessary venom and sex appeal. George might have had his balls lopped off by Martha. But Mr. Irwin makes him neutrally asexual, like a whiteface clown. His movements are innately light, even airless. His tight facial expressions are too much a mask.

There's no subtext in the mannered Mr. Irwin, and little or no variation. George's crucial Act II scene with the younger faculty member, Nick (the excellent David Harbour), ought to be a chilling demolition job, a malicious killing of apparent innocence for sport. But Mr. Irwin isn't really scaring anyone.

The veteran British director, Anthony Page, has erred by casting a Nick who's a bigger man than George! Mr. Harbour makes Mr. Irwin look lighter and less substantial than he actually is. The mousy Honey of Mireille Enos has been encouraged to play too broadly for laughs. The admirable Ms. Turner takes the play. When she's not onstage, we miss her too much. But in the dominant force of Martha is the play's weakness.

I've never understood why George's taunting, last-minute admission to Nick and Honey that they had a son-whether he's real or imagined-should leave Martha pleading helplessly with him to stop, as if the Wicked Witch had suddenly been shrunk to nothing.

"No more," Martha begs George uncharacteristically. But he cannot be stopped. He's breaking the unwritten rules of the game and is going to kill off their child. He was killed, George announces, driving on a country road when he swerved to avoid a porcupine.

The dramatist's stage note has Martha "quivering with rage and loss": "NO! NO!" she protests. "YOU CANNOT DO THAT! YOU CAN'T DECIDE THAT FOR YOURSELF! I WILL NOT LET YOU DO THAT!"

It's high melodrama. The illusion of the child is what appears to keep George and Martha together. But the overdramatic, convenient conclusion is why Mr. Albee's groundbreaking drama stops short of greatness. Blame the porcupine.

"Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf …," George sings softly like a nightmare lullaby at the close.

"I ... am ... George ... I ... am ..." Martha admits forebodingly, just before the curtain descends.

For myself, they were the only words she said the entire evening that I didn't believe.

Not I (as that misery, Samuel Beckett, put it). The general idea is to have a good time with clowns, and usually I like nothing more. But you must never feel isolated by comedy. Laughter revels in the company it keeps. The wise theater saying goes, "We laugh together and grieve privately." But what if the clowning leaves you feeling lonely?

The much-admired Mr. Irwin isn't to blame. Well, not entirely. I found his 75-minute Harlequin Studies , the first show of his season at the Signature, too studious . His series of traditional commedia dell'arte sketches proved a rarefied enchantment zone-a schoolroom guide in muted good taste to such high-flown concepts as "Archetype and Individual." But all I craved was the custard pie.

I thought at the time that why we laugh at certain things rather than others was an unsolvable mystery of the universe. After all, people suddenly burst out laughing at funerals. There they are, laying a loved one to rest, and they're in uncontrollable fits of laughter! The tears roll just the same.

As I say, it makes no sense. And what makes you laugh needn't tickle my fancy (and vice versa). Or, as the comic said whenever a routine was greeted with a tremendous round of indifference, "Suit yourselves!"

But I had higher hopes for Mr. Irwin's second offering in the Signature series, a revival of his 20-year-old tour de force about the very nature of clowning and theater, The Regard of Flight , though it's been blandly renamed, for some reason, The Regard Evening . The key word was flight . Mr. Irwin declares that he's trying to flee the old and traditional in favor of "the new, new theater" (which includes "the new, new ventriloquism," which looks like the old, old ventriloquism to me). And his clown also appears to be fleeing some mysterious thing -a threat, a death sentence.

The moment Mr. Irwin approaches the wings, weird, unseen forces try to drag him off, as if giving him the hook. He's at his rubbery best-and funniest-when he's scrambling desperately against the magnetic pull of gravity. Besides, he exists only onstage. Oblivion is found in the wings.

Yet he sleeps lightly . The opening image shows Mr. Irwin contentedly asleep in bed in his red-striped jammies. He seems to be floating in a surreal dreamland an inch or two above the bed. He shrinks in size wonderfully, too. In Act II, his now middle-aged self becomes this tiny, bent old clown-crone en route to dissolving like the Wicked Witch. Mr. Irwin's miraculous physical dexterity is beyond question, of course. But who is he? A bewildered innocent won't quite do it. He knows too much. Who is he playing?

My problem with Mr. Irwin is that he's playing at being a clown. The Regard Evening once again has the feel of the classroom-of demonstrations made and lessons earnestly learned (and overintellectualized ideas easily debunked). It's a livelier class than the solemn Harlequin Studies , but a Clown School even so, and one possessing its own brand of pretension.

The composer and pianist, Doug Skinner, thus acts as a kind of all-knowing director, teacher at the podium and stage hand. "Warning!" Mr. Skinner announces, for example. "Costume change!" The stage hand's unseen, scary instructions-"Stand by!"-are a device long since used by the French Absurdists. But as Mr. Irwin changes into a clown's costume displayed like a totem, Mr. Skinner will then inform us drolly that they are "demystifying the theater process" or making "a formalist construct" of the "postmodern."

Intended to satirize the jargon of drama schools, it only strikes me as smug-an easy joke at the expense of obvious artiness that's already been told many, many times before. In his youth, Mr. Irwin studied with the theater theorist and intellectual Herbert Blau. "Bill," observes Mr. Skinner during Mr. Irwin's really unfunny send-up of an actor trying to perform a Shakespeare parody, "I'm not following your choices at all …. "

Who is? But it's enough, apparently, for Mr. Irwin to hit a facile populist note to bring down the house. His other longtime collaborator, Michael O'Connor, functions as some kind of arch critic or conscience. "Warning!" you might think. "Another dated idea …. "

"Are you a voice in my head?" Mr. Irwin balefully asks his conscience-critic within. Deep down, you see, he's a neurotic clown. He worries . He doesn't touch us, as clowns must. He's being dragged away by unseen forces, he hates drama schools, he's very busy being intellectual about not being intellectual, and now he's hearing voices. His onstage toilet is also perilously out of reach, and I haven't been feeling too great myself lately. But, at best, it's all too precious for me, too "knowing," too "human."

It's not what I'm used to. All clowns are acts of nostalgia, except to the child. They are our childhood memories rekindled. Thomas Mann, no less, described clowns in Confessions of Felix Krull as "basically alien beings … side-splitting, world-renouncing monks of unreason, cavorting hybrids, part human, part insane art." For me, the clowns of my childhood were precisely that- not really human . They were exotic, mysterious and mad. They smelled of sawdust and seemed to come from another planet, like aliens. They were a source of wonder .

I saw a fabulous clown recently at Circus Oz , the lunatic Australian traveling circus at the New Victory Theater. The show opened with the entry of the veteran clown, Tim Coldwell, who came on walking upside-down on the roof of the stage to the music of "Send in the Clowns." He astonished me! He was walking upside down about 40 feet in the air. I realize he did it with magnetic boots, but still- you try it! He sat at a table stuck to the ceiling and had a little whisky from a glass. Then he sort of walked upside down into his floppy clown jacket and zoomed perilously down a pole head first to the stage-or earth.

When I was 6 or 7, the best of all the clowns were Charlie Cairoli and Paul, and I saw them every year when the circus came to town. Charlie was the adored red-nose clown in baggy pants. He was all custard pies and buckets of water. Paul was the white-face clown, always immaculate in his dazzling Pierrot costume in the dust and dirt of the circus ring. But the funnier the outrageous Charlie became, the sadder Paul was. I could never understand it. In the midst of Charlie's chaos, Paul played a saxophone, and the sound he made was like a wail of grief. I remember asking my parents, "Why is Paul so sad when Charlie is so happy?" But they never told me.

Mr. Irwin's ironic "new, new theater" doesn't take me-or him-forward into the future. In fact, he's sentimental about the past and the noble heritage of clowns. But it isn't his fault in this regard: He can't return me to the innocence of childhood where "art" doesn't exist, or where comedy and tragedy once lived unknown to me in foreboding partnership.

Bill Irwin's 75-minute The Harlequin Studies at the Signature didn't do that for me, unfortunately. The "studies" in his title makes his clowning much too dry and academic for my taste. Scholarly, half-jesting references are made to a meeting of Archetype and Individual when all one yearns for is the custard pie. The modest little sketches are textbook stuff: Mischievous Harlequin fools his gullible old master Pantalone once again ; Harlequin juggles plate; Harlequin juggles hat; Harlequin walks down invisible stairs; Harlequin falls in love with Wrong Girl. Alas, we see the jokes coming in a dull enchantment zone occupied only by rarefied, overindulged clowning. Everything is in muted good taste. Even when Mr. Irwin is vulgar, he farts quietly.

That said, I must report that the audience as a whole seemed to enjoy Mr. Irwin and his fellow clowns (who tumble a lot). Only a pocket of malcontents surrounding me, as if placed in separate seating for the Anti-Life, failed to respond to his watery reconstruction of traditional commedia dell'arte (cf. commedia , 1550-1800). The vitality and daring of truly spontaneous improvisation-a glorious liberty and individualism that can bring a theater to uncontrolled uproar-are the magical qualities that keep the commedia dell'arte tradition alive. Mr. Irwin, in partnership with the unpredictable extrovert David Shiner, was wonderfully funny in Fool Moon on Broadway. But his lackluster Harlequin Studies needs a red nose, or the child's infectious, unstoppable howls of laughter.

But what makes me laugh-and what makes you laugh-are mysterious things. Or, as Laurence Olivier once put it charmingly about an admired fellow actor who was playing a comic role, "He's as much humor as a dead baby in an open coffin." We can theorize about laughter a thousand ways, as Freud and Bergson did, but in the end, why we laugh when we do is an unsolvable mystery. I was once fortunate enough to interview one of the greatest comics in England, Ken (Doddy) Dodd, whose manic, vaudevillian genius was informed by his own very serious studies into the history of laughter. He was an intellectual of humor who once defined Malvolio as the sort of man who used to stand up in a strip club and shout, "What time do the jugglers come on?" He even wondered during our meeting why we make the sound of laughter. "I mean," he suggested in all seriousness, "why doesn't your nose light up instead?"

There's no answer to that. But Freud's theories of comedy were no use to Doddy as a performer. "The problem with Freud," he explained, "is that he never played the Glasgow Empire, second house, Saturday night." The old Glasgow Empire was the fabled graveyard of comics. No fancy Freudian theories could help the entertainer who was brave or foolish enough to go out there and face the mob.

And yet there are people who can make us laugh on sight. Bill Murray makes me laugh without actually doing anything. Jokes per se tend to embarrass me. I always worry I won't get the joke. Ricky Gervais, the brilliant "anti-comedian" who created the BBC America import The Office , makes me laugh precisely because the character he plays to sly deadpan perfection thinks he's funny but isn't. I've never found Jerry Seinfeld funny. Steve Martin-always; Chris Rock-no. I prefer Keaton to Chaplin, funnily enough. Anyone who slips on a banana peel is funny. Donald Rumsfeld is funny. So is any Preston Sturges movie, any time. Oscar Wilde isn't as funny as he would like to be. (He's witty .) Margaret Cho-no; Jonathan Swift-yes. I threw in Swift to be impressively Swiftian. And all the loved, eccentric performers from my childhood, including this eternal exchange between a drunk and a man nursing a cardboard box under his arm who has just returned from Egypt with an elephant:

"Where do you keep the elephant?" the drunk asks him.

"It's in this box."

"I thought I heard a rustling!"

Which brings me to my favorite, Eddie Izzard, the transvestite wizard who had us all in stitches during his new Sexie touring show that stopped off at the packed City Center. Times have changed! I first saw him testing the waters hilariously seven years ago at the Performance Space 122 downtown, where he wore high heels, quite modest PVC trousers, green nail varnish, red lipstick, perhaps a dab of rouge. But Uptown Eddie at City Center was wearing knee-high spiked boots, fetching fishnet stockings, a sparkly black skirt slit to the waist, plus a form-fitting bustier, red lipstick (of course), eye makeup that was a little heavy on the kohl, a stylish spiky haircut with great blond highlighting and all of it tastefully set off with diamond earrings. But this is the point:

He's still our Eddie! Success in America hasn't spoiled him in the least. He's always looked like a doll. Why does he dress like a woman? It's what he likes to do. He's in artful costume! I wrote when I first saw him that his surprising costume of sexual ambiguity is as traditional and unthreatening as the white-face clown's.

Now here's a performance that brings an audience to the point of mad laughter while seeming to be utterly, spontaneously improvised. Mr. Izzard doesn't tell jokes; he isn't hostile. He doesn't ask to be liked or loved (but he is). He seems to have no political agenda (though he's clearly a libertarian). He's an absurdist storyteller conjuring up insane stage pictures. He's a literate fantasist in the noble tradition of rambling on about absolutely anything that comes to mind-including using false breasts as earmuffs, the agonizingly slow pace of archaeologists, stabbing children on planes with forks, the unbelievable popularity of balsamic vinegar, the retelling of Homer's Odyssey from the vantage point of a water skier, dog racing from the point of view of the greyhounds, Neanderthal man decorating a house and-if I heard it right-the sound of cats thrown out of a car window.

He's such a master of the unpredictable that he pretends to get lost. "Where was I?" he asked at one point, peering out at us. "So … yes. But. O.K.! Fifty thousand years ago. Stay with me …."

There's a link, incidentally, with the stream-of-consciousness comedy of one of Britain's music-hall greats, Frankie Howerd, whose insane diversions and asides gave you the impression that he'd lost the plot, too. "No, don't. Well. Yes. I mean," Frankie would say. "Pull yourselves together! You'll make me a laughing stock …. "

But there's no one like Eddie Izzard. I don't know of any performer who's as unique or as funny. His comic genius is that his surreal, near-cozy chats liberate us to such dizzying heights that we don't want to pull ourselves together at all.

"I'm so sorry," said the latter, looking up from the reservations book. "But you are so late we had to give your table away. I'm afraid we will have to seat you up here."

"No way!" the woman bellowed, as if she had just been told to eat in the kitchen. "No! No! No! Let me talk to Robert …" With that, she disappeared down a flight of stairs in the back of the room, followed by two young men.

The bartender shrugged. "She's an hour and 10 minutes late for her table."

Not that in Morocco everyone always arrives on time. Nor, as I remember from the time I spent there several years ago, would they expect to get a table at all if they had booked without saying Insha'allah (God willing). If Allah wills it, your plans will be met; but you are not a free agent in the matter, so there is no point in getting upset, since between a plan and its being carried out, Allah often has all sorts of other plans. If, for example, on your way to Chez Es Saada, you ran into an old friend and decided to go to Balthazar instead, the person you stood up would understand. Most likely Allah would have willed something else for him, too, and he would not have been there, anyway.

Chez Es Saada is wildly popular, but it only seats 35 in the downstairs dining room-which is why, when you call for a reservation, you are likely to be told they can seat you at 6 P.M. or 11 P.M.-and why it's O.K. to pull out a packet of Casa Sport (or any other cigarettes) for a few puffs between courses.

The restaurant is on the ground floor and basement of an old school building that has been converted to lofts upstairs. Rose petals are scattered on the Moroccan tile that leads to the basement where a gorgeous, friendly hostess in a long gold slip dress waits to show you to your table. The banquets are covered in striped Berber wool, the brick walls painted peach with blue alcoves, set with a fountain and giant Moroccan lamps. In the back is a lounge; the music gets louder as the evening progresses, veering between disco and North African. The customers are an odd blend of young and cool along with an older, Upper East Side crowd in business suits and velvet headbands.

Customers are not seated cross-legged on the floor at low, round tables, as they would be in Morocco. Nor are they expected to eat their food with the first three fingers of the right hand, a feat that can be difficult when it comes to couscous.

The couscous at Chez Es Saada was made not with meat or chicken but vegetables, simmered in a dark sauce lightly spiced with harissa and topped with toasted slivered almonds. The lamb tagine was good, too, thick and dark, with ginger, prunes and honey, accompanied by anise-flavored flatbread. Salmon, seared in a crust of Moroccan spices such as cumin and cracked coriander seed, was beautifully fresh and cooked on the rare side, as I like it.

Roast chicken, marinated in dried lime and aleppo pepper, was tender and juicy, although the grilled figs that it came with were a bit too charred. Merguez, a spicy lamb sausage that was a special of the day, was also delicious, served on a heap of mashed sweet and white potatoes.

A first course of Moroccan salads that included creamy eggplant and carrot salads and egg mayonnaise was a bit cold from the refrigerator from which it had been removed seconds before, plate and all. The best choice was fresh sardines. In Morocco, they grill them right on the harbor dock, fresh off the fishing boats. At Chez Es Saada, they come not on a slab of bread (as in the port town Essaouira) but on a salad of frisée in a mustardy dressing with black olives.

For dessert, there was a nice, old-fashioned chocolate pot de crème, a fine lemon tart and phyllo turnovers stuffed with honey and nuts that were 10 times as good as baklava.

The short wine list at Chez Es Saada is reasonably priced and has a couple of Moroccan choices that are very cheap. We decided on a red wine called Guerrounane.

Our waiter brought over the bottle and held it up so that we could read the label. "Oh, dear," said my companion, looking discouraged. "On the bottle is one of those wine apologies that begins, 'This full-bodied wine' …" But the wine was actually very pleasant and smooth and went well with the spiciness and sweetness of the food.

Not everyone loves Moroccan cooking as much as I do. At the end of the last century, an Italian named Edmundo de Amicis described a wedding feast in Tangier. "Merciful heaven! My impulse was to fall upon the cook. Every shade of expression which might cross the face of a man suddenly attacked by colic, or on hearing of the sudden and unexpected failure of his banker, must have appeared on mine … I can give no ideas of the taste left in my mouth except by comparing myself to some unfortunate condemned to swallow the contents of all the bottles and boxes in a hairdresser's establishment … huge dishes of inviting appearance, but everything swimming in the most horrible sauces, greasy, anointed, perfumed and prepared in such a manner that a comb seemed a more fitting instrument to dip into them than a fork."

If he had dined at Chez Es Saada, perhaps he would have changed his mind. Insha'allah .

Chez es Saada *1/2

42 East First Street, between First and Second avenues, 777-5617

dress: Slip dresses, jeans

noise level: High

wine list: Short, well priced

credit cards: All major

price range: Dinner $15.50 to $19

dinner: Sunday to Thursday 6 P.M. to 2 A.M., Friday and Saturday to 4 A.M.

* good

** very good

*** excellent

**** outstanding

no star poor