Barker—whose theatrical ideals and theories paved the way for the foundation of England’s National Theatre—was a Shavian (he produced and directed many G.B. Shaw plays at the original Royal Court Theatre and was a leading actor in them). Shaw’s influence on The Madras House (1909) is clear, particularly in its witty take on stifling social conventions and the role of those tantalizing, mysterious things, women. But the play in turn influenced Shaw, inspiring him to write a companion piece, Misalliance (1910). And what a weird, intelligent, overstuffed comedy with a conscience Madras House turns out to be!

It’s essentially about shopping (and the wage slaves who manufacture the goods). This is the first morally serious play I’ve seen to include a fashion show. The idealistic zealot and sexual cold fish, Philip Madras, is selling the family fashion house and drapery business to an American millionaire. Philip disapproves of haute couture for exploiting women, and resents his perplexed wife simply for being there. He also rejects his inheritance as a symbolic gesture toward a new, spiritual England.

In any other play, Philip would be declared legally insane. Barker describes him in his notes as a man “capable of that least English of dispositions—intellectual passion.” Among others in the crowded cast, there’s Philip’s grieving mother and bumbling, privileged uncle, who can’t keep count of his six unmarried children. There’s a pregnant worker—a proto-feminist—who has to be sacked. (Who can her lover be?) And there’s Philip’s philandering father, Constantine, a Mohammedan convert who abandoned his wife and England to live with various concubines in the Middle East.

Madras House doesn’t have a plot as such. Barker wrote “discussion plays,” and his characters do little else but talk—and talk. (Barker’s modern heir is Tom Stoppard in history-of- Russia mode.) “The things you think when you start to think,” announces Uncle Henry about the irresistibility of women, and Barker gives us a great deal more to think about in his four neatly balanced acts: England and its stifling Puritanism, the hypocrisy of family values, the know-how of American entrepreneurship, the purpose of art and culture, the commercial exploitation of workers, spiritual revolution versus the opiate of shopping. On marketing, women and fashion, Barker was ahead of his time.

The moral of Madras House appears to be that relationships between the sexes are hopeless. (For good measure, our prim hero Philip dislikes men and women, and his wife doesn’t care much for men.) Or we can put it another way: How, the play asks earnestly, can we sublimate all the sexual energy we waste on one another, and so create the time to cure the evils of the world? And if you know the answer to that, tell Harley Granville-Barker.

The Madras House creaks a bit at times—by Jove it does! (And being a woman is jolly difficult!) Though the overlong text has been cut, it’s still a three-hour evening (and Barker repeats himself). But Gus Kaikkonen’s production on the Mint’s small stage is a welcome one and, for the most, part well acted. I would have preferred George Morfogen’s Constantine to be less serene, and possibly more flamboyantly wolfish. Thomas Hammond’s messianic, sexually aloof Philip is exactly right. I was so struck by the unknown actress in the supporting role of Emma, one of the Huxtable daughters, that I looked her up in the Playbill. Allison McLemore, a recent college grad, is making an enchanting New York debut, and surely has wonderful things ahead of her.

A WORD OR TWO IN FAVOR OF THE ART of silliness. It takes a genial kind of talent to be truly silly, and I won’t hear a word against Christopher Durang anyway. In an unusual program note, Mr. Durang writes of Adrift in Macao, his affectionate musical spoof of film noir at the 59East59 Street Theaters, that if Graham Greene could distinguish between his psychological novels and the minor mysteries he termed “entertainments,’’ Mr. Durang would like to make the same distinction in his own work. And why not? He explains that his more serious satires are written in frustration to point out the stupidities of life that upset him, whereas a parody springs from fondness for the subject. A “friendly-silly” piece like Adrift in Macao is written in a good mood.

Or, as his blond dame Lureena, fresh off the boat in a slinky satin dress, puts it: “I been around.” It’s true that film noir send-ups aren’t new. (Among two thousand of them, one thinks of Charles Busch’s Shanghai Moon or the Cy Coleman/Larry Gelbart City of Angels.) But only Mr. Durang would dare to invent a tough-talking nightclub owner named Rick Shaw. Or a “very scrutable” Chinese manservant who’s named Tempura because he’s been “battered by life.”

One enjoys groaning happily, and there’s much opportunity here. “I may be beautiful and even oversexed,” Lureena announces, “but business is business and never the twain shall meet.”

“Which twain?” Rick asks.

“The gwavy twain,” replies smoky Lureena.

The moral of Adrift in Macao might not be as gwave as that of The Madras House, but minor Christopher Durang is far, far better than no Durang at all. Directed by Sheryl Kaller, with a small, talented cast, the show has a very catchy score by Peter Melnick. At the end, we all get to sing along merrily to the sincerely awful “Ticky Ticky Tock,” led by Billy Holliday Wong.

She doesn’t exactly carry the show. She is the show. This isn’t to say that Mr. Beane’s three other characters—the closeted gay movie star, his straight-ish rent boy and the bimbette with “the party-girl vibe”—don’t have their moments. The smart dramatist of As Bees in Honey Drown (who also wrote the screenplay To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar) has given all of them big laughs. But with Ms. White’s unstoppable, venal Diane tearing up the stage, this surprising comedy of manners is surely blessed.

The fortyish actress—who toiled as the sidekick on Grace Under Fire—has worked in theater a lot, but without real success until now. She says brightly that for her role as Diane she drew on the idea of the crafty servant in Molière. It works brilliantly! The agent is essentially the servant to the star (though higher up the glittering ladder than his personal stylist and Pilates trainer). Ms. White is performing a classic example of whirlwind commedia dell’arte. Or, as the wired, dedicated Diane likes to say about her role, she’s “on a journey up the hill with a cross.”

Plays about the farcical insanity of Hollywood or the giant egos of actors aren’t new, of course (c.f. David Rabe, Charles Busch, David Mamet). I feared that Mr. Beane’s comedy about a movie star in the closet might turn out to be as passé as poor Rock Hudson. But The Little Dog Laughed (to see such fun) is witty, bitchy and even quite savage. Douglas Carter Beane (himself openly gay) has it both ways, if I may say so: He pulls off a deftly miraculous achievement by seeming to be both pro-gay and anti-gay simultaneously.

He leaves it to his outrageous, spiky heroine to speak for him. Diane is a dyke and can therefore say anything. “I’m lesbian, he’s a fag,” she announces breezily at the start about her relationship with the closeted Mitchell (Tom Everett Scott). “We’re in show business, we’re a perfect couple.”

Diane is a showbiz witch who’s a disciple of the sand mandalas of the Mahayana Buddhist monks of the Namgyal monastery, which remind the world—she explains—that man’s toil is ultimately folly.

“I don’t have adventures,” says Mitchell when Diane accuses him of having sex with Alex (Johnny Galecki).

“Please. You’re like Huckleberry Finn,” she replies. “Huckleberry Finn on a raft made out of rent boy.”

“What makes you think he’s a rent boy?”

“You’re sleeping with him.”

Mitchell began having gay sex in the Boy Scouts (“the merit badge that dare not speak its name”). “So what if I have a ‘friend’?” he protests. “Maybe I’ll be a famous actor with a ‘friend.’”

“Are you British?” Diane asks him indignantly—a response that brings down the house. “Are you knighted? If not, shut up.”

Ably directed by Scott Ellis, The Little Dog Laughed is for grown-ups: Our coarse, uncensored heroine takes no prisoners. When a “fag playwright” wants her word that the film script of his touching gay love story won’t be changed in any way, she practically has a heart attack. “My word? You want my … what type of negotiation ploy is this? What type of mind fuck is this? … You’re asking a whore for her cherry.”

Perhaps the film talk is a little “insidery” (“A writer with final cut,” Diane groans amusingly. “I would rather give firearms to small children”). Perhaps Mr. Beane’s more sentimental moments—when Mitchell and the rent boy Alex teeter inevitably on the edge of falling in love—are a little too sappy. (“You have me. O.K. I’m here …. ”) It’s also arguable that Alex’s long affair with Ellen (Ari Graynor), the only straight at the party, is a stretch. At the end of the day, however, The Little Dog Laughed is a smashing sex comedy. In Julie White’s electrifying company, all is well with the world.

A Tale of Two Houses

A lot of The Little Dog Laughed takes place in an immaculately soulless hotel room and in imaginary chic restaurants. I like onstage houses to be messy, however. The roof should be falling in, or better still, on the verge. Yet neat, antiseptic houses seem to be the over-careful norm lately, like tiptoeing through garbage when disaster has struck.

I’ve been disappointed recently in two houses that are a century apart: Sarah Ruhl’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Clean House, directed by Bill Rauch at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, and George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, directed by Robin Lefevre at the Roundabout on Broadway (now extended to Dec. 17). Both plays come with prestigious casts and heavy cultural baggage: the fine actresses Blair Brown and Jill Clayburgh for Ms. Ruhl (along with a recent MacArthur Foundation “genius” award); the distinguished Philip Bosco, Swoosie Kurtz and Byron Jennings for G.B. Shaw (along with the witty, imposing legend of G.B. Shaw).

I can never quite make up my mind whether Shaw is a narcissistic old windbag or as clever as he would always have us believe. To be in his peacock company is to be dominated by a know-it-all and a man of ideas. I think his Pygmalion a great, proto-feminist play about the British class system (better even than My Fair Lady). Whenever I see his masterpiece, Heartbreak House, however, I’m reminded of an irreverent friend’s damning judgment: “Chekhov for philistines.”

Shaw’s English country house of self-deluding upper-class wastrels on the eve of the world war apocalypse is “Chekhovian,” if only because everyone talks a lot. The wordy play, with its nutty, visionary old salt, Captain Shotover, is a blatant metaphor for bankrupt England. John Lee Beatty’s literal setting is a lapse: The house ought to represent a ship. And Mr. Beatty’s exterior set for Act II is too seductively pretty—unthreatened by any suggestion of decay or imminent collapse. “Is this England or is this a madhouse?” goes one of Shaw’s less subtle pronouncements. Or Hession’s melodramatic, “I am just wondering how much longer I can stand living in this cruel, damnable world.”

This is the cruel, damnable thing: Whatever my doubts about Shaw—my inability, if you will, to accept him whole—this loving, studious production of Heartbreak House is altogether too tidy. I felt no emotional connection with anyone onstage. Should you see the production—admired by some—ask yourself whether you’re moved by it. You’re meant to be. But this is a heartbreak house without heartbreak.

So is Ms. Ruhl’s The Clean House—in spite of the carefully staged, highly organized mess that disrupts the perfect white house “that is not far from the city and not far from the sea.”

That self-consciously airy description is a warning sign. The house is real, yet not real. It is neither here nor there—too much like the play itself, I’m afraid. In her New York debut, Ms. Ruhl nevertheless proves herself to be a gifted, quirky dramatist. I very much liked her Milan Kundera conceit of a woman in search of the perfect joke—a joke so funny it will make you die laughing. But the specifics are disappointing:

“The perfect joke makes you forget about your life. The perfect joke makes you remember about your life,” says Matilde, the “wise’’ Brazilian house maid who hates to clean house. She’s the one trying to discover the perfect joke, but no one person can invent it. “It passed through the air and you caught it,” Matilde explains enigmatically. “The perfect joke is somewhere between an angel and a fart.”

It is? “Somewhere between an angel and a fart” might strike us as impressive at first—an original thought. It’s baloney. The Clean House is a contrived and overworked social comedy, though not without a welcome, eccentric charm. There’s the cold, thoroughly organized mistress of the house—a doctor who’s left suddenly by her apparently happy husband. He’s a surgeon who’s fallen madly, messily in love with his soulmate, a cancer-stricken 67-year-old patient. There’s also the desperately unhappy, neurotic sister who adores cleaning house in order to measure some weird notion of progress, who replaces the jokester maid.

A potentially beguiling play turns out to be mild and anemic. There are a few laughs, but they’re mostly gently wry. There’s a bloodless form of reality and there’s a little magic realism with symbolic apples thrown in. There are serious issues—love, passion, cancer—but they aren’t serious or threatening enough to frighten the horses.

The Clean House refers to life as a soap opera once too often for its own good. There’s a point when it even becomes a full-blown opera (sort of). Ms. Ruhl’s nice, clean, troubled house has everything—except the very thing her play needs most: authentic feeling.