Jonathan Groff and Eddie Kaye Thomas in "The Submission."

Theater, like most entertainment, requires suspension of disbelief. (Wait, why are these people living their lives in a three-walled, brightly lit room?) But tolerance for that suspension exists on a continuum, and a serious drama about a hot-button political topic has a much greater obligation for plausibility than does, say, a musical comedy about Mormon missionaries.

The actor and playwright Jeff Talbott has delivered a serious drama about a hot-button political topic—a spiky, funny message play called The Submission. It’s about a gay, white 20-something named Danny (played by Jonathan Groff, charming and slippery and the best he’s been since Spring Awakening), who writes a message play about a black mother and son struggling in the projects, for which he invents an African-sounding pseudonym to lend authorial credibility. When the script is accepted by the prestigious Humana Festival, he hires Emilie (an excellent, fierce Rutina Wesley), an African-American actress, to pretend to be its author. She takes the job, excited to help get the play seen and lured by her promised share of the royalties. Inevitably, the scheme collapses, for all the obvious reasons but also because Danny turns out to be something of a racist and Emily something of a homophobe.

The Submission opened last night in an MCC Theater production at the Lucille Lortel, a top-notch staging smoothly directed by Walter Bobbie and convincingly acted by an excellent quartet of young pros. (The other actors are Eddie Kaye Thomas as Pete, Danny’s stoic, wry boyfriend, and Will Rogers as Trevor, his goofy, conflicted best friend, who falls in love with Emilie.) David Zinn’s scenic design is efficiently functional and subtly witty. And Mr. Talbott’s script is carefully structured, building elegantly from light to heavy as the plot progresses and tension mounts, and it offers smart, punchy dialogue, while raising provocative questions.

This all makes The Submission an insightful and somewhat damning take on political correctness among ostensible liberals in the so-called post-gay and post-black eras—unless, that is, it’s an unconvincing melodrama that speaks in clichés. Your reaction will depend entirely on your willingness to ignore the play’s implausibilities.

In a play striving for realism, it’s tough to imagine that anyone—the writer or the actress—would think this faux-black-author scheme would be a good idea, or even that Danny would, over coffee, sketch out his scheme for an actress he barely knows. (What if she’d said no, and what if she mentioned it to anyone else in their mutual off-off-Broadway world?) Mr. Talbott tries to paper over this problem by adding another motivation: that both Danny and Emilie are entranced by all the money they’ll make if the play is successfully produced. But this is even more problematic—who was the last person to get rich from playwriting? From festival-produced playwriting? And, finally, as bits of Danny’s racism and Emilie’s homophobia begin to slip out, it’s not that it’s so hard to imagine that they have these suppressed feelings—as Avenue Q reminds us, everyone’s a little bit racist—but that, as theater-world New Yorkers, they don’t know better what to keep to themselves.

If you get hung up on these points, the play will seem soulless, no matter how well produced. But if you’re able to accept them—and you very well could; they’re relatively small implausibilities—it’s hard not to be impressed.

There are real ideas at play here—the limits of political correctness, the value of competing claims of victimhood, the question of whether there’s bigotry buried within all of us—and they’re confronted by real characters. Danny is an especially rich one, a seeming nice guy slowly revealed to be a heartless manipulator, and Mr. Groff plays him superbly, retaining much of that initial affable manner even as fangs start to appear in his broad smile.

“It’s taut. It’s mean,” Trevor tells Danny when he first reads his play. “It feels very—I hate this word—authentic.” But the whole problem is that it’s not really authentic, not with the scrim of a fake author. That nagging inauthenticity is the trouble, too, with Mr. Talbott’s otherwise taut and mean play.

Or, on the other hand, you could give up on plausibility—and logic—entirely. That’s the fun of Eugène Ionesco’s first play, the absurdist gem The Bald Soprano, which he wrote in French in 1948 and which has been playing continuously in Paris since 1957. Its English translation, by Donald M. Allen, came to the United States soon thereafter, and a crisp and delightful Pearl Theatre Company revival opened at City Center Stage II Sunday night.

Brad Heberlee and Jolly Abraham in The Bald Soprano

The Bald Soprano is set in what appears to be—and what we’re told is—a run-of-the-mill living room in a run-of-the-mill London suburb, where a run-of-the-mill British couple is hosting friends for dinner. Or who have hosted friends for dinner. Or who have had dinner at home with the kids. It’s all unclear, and that’s the point.

Ionesco dubbed The Bald Soprano an “anti-play,” and it is indeed in some ways the opposite of a play, as a play is understood in the conventional sense. Things happen, but not with any linear progression or coherent motivation, time jumps around, dialogue is frequently nonsensical. Mostly the characters—Mr. and Mrs. Smith, their guests Mr. and Mrs. Martin, the maid, and the fire chief—speak in pleasant non sequiturs.

Ionesco was inspired to write the play while trying to teach himself English with a repeat-the-phrase program, and the dialogue has the feel of a particularly puckish language primer. “There, it is 9 o’clock,” Mrs. Smith says at the play’s start, after a chime has tolled 17 times. “We’ve drunk the soup, and eaten the fish and chips, and the English salad. The children have drunk English water. We’ve eaten well this evening. That’s because we live in the suburbs of London and because our name is Smith.” (The Observer was reminded of the apex of our Hebrew-school career, when we could form the complete sentence “The teacher is on the  table.”) Mr. Smith, for some reason, replies with a cluck.

Dan Daily and Robin Leslie Brown in The Bald Soprano

As directed with deadpan and occasionally slapstick precision by Hal Brooks and performed by an equally deadpan cast from the Pearl resident company, the whole thing is seriously goofy and thoroughly enjoyable. There are glimmers, naturally, of a deeper point: the futility of communication, the sameness of communication, the interchangeability of peoples’ words and thoughts and problems.

Or maybe it is this, as, in the play’s final moment, the actors previously playing the Martins say in beginning the Smiths’ opening exchange: Whatever you’ll say, it’s all just more of the same.

editorial@observer.com

The Atlantic is on a roll! The theater has followed its production of Martin McDonagh’s staggeringly original black farce, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, with a wholly original musical based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 Spring Awakening—of all things. The play was severely censored in its day. (Wedekind’s better-known “Lulu” plays are the basis of Alan Berg’s opera, Lulu). The musical adaptation is a surprise, however—and a delightful one—though the landmark 19th-century play about adolescent sex and prudish adults in a provincial German town could easily appear passé today.

The major achievement of Steven Sater’s book and lyrics, and Duncan Sheik’s superb rock score is to have found the modern within Wedekind’s stifling, repressed world. Comparisons have inevitably been made with Rent, particularly as Spring Awakening’s wonderfully gifted cast playing teenagers actually looks young. But Jonathan Larson’s Rent is sentimental showbiz, while Spring Awakening in its knee-high breeches will never make a window display in Bloomingdale’s. It is too unshowily good for that—too fine in its lyrical sensibility and melting stage poetry of the inarticulate.

Touch me—just like that.

Now lower down, where the sins lie ...

Love me—just for a bit ...

We’ll wander down, where the winds sigh ...

The notion of sin—and therefore of shame—is comparatively new to us! The terribly undervalued Tony Kushner–Jeanine Tesori chamber piece, Caroline, or Change, explored childhood guilt and an adult’s shame at even being alive. But our bankrupt jukebox musical age more typically relishes cynicism. It is all about retro-pastiche and that catchall of insincerity, irony. Now comes the musical of the turn-of-the-century Spring Awakening to reverse all the rules and astonish us. In the 21st century, where everything is known (and available), where no fumbling teenage rite of passage seems even possible any more—what price childhood innocence?

The ambitious piece tells a story of abusive parents and corrupt teachers, of rape and abortion and suicide—the other side of growing up. Yet it is never predictable, for almost every scene is freshly conceived and the “O” of the lament for the damaged speaks directly to us:

O, I’m gonna be wounded.

O, I’m gonna be your wound.

O, I’m gonna bruise you.

O, you’re gonna be my bruise.

A lovely, unembarrassed, unhip yearning is its keynote. The plaintive urgency of the schoolkids in Spring Awakening is a near-expressionist state of mind in the midst of hormonal chaos and sticky dreams. Romance is feverish, naturally, and potentially a bummer. “I try to just kick it, but then, what can I do?” goes the song about stormy teen crushes. “We’ve all got our junk, and my junk is you.” More than a few of us in the audience burst into laughter at that witty line. In its precocious way, it was as realistic about life as the guilty boy’s sweet song with the lyric, “There’s a moment you know … you’re fucked.”

Spring Awakening is about misunderstood teen angst, whirling, uncontrollable feelings and junk. It’s about ridiculous, manic energy, which Bill T. Jones’ choreography captures in fractured, jagged spasms and wild leaps of the imagination. Yet there is, at its pure heart, a melancholy spirit that touches us—from the beautiful Act I close, with its tantalizing dawn of sexual love, to the final moments of wary celebration and fear at the crossroads of adulthood: “And all shall know the wonder / I will sing the song / Of purple summer …. ”

Director Michael Mayer has achieved his finest work in partnership with his first-rate design team, Christine Jones, Susan Hilferty and Kevin Adams. The sound by Brian Housman, incidentally, is perfect. The cast is led by the excellent Jonathan Groff as Melchior, Lea Michele as Wendla and John Gallagher Jr. as the punkish mess Moritz. All the adult roles are played by Tony Award winner Frank Wood and Mary McCann, stalwart founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company. The adults never sing, however. Only the young sing.

With its memorable score and spare imaginative simplicity, Spring Awakening is a breakthrough musical of the highest order.

Truth in Advertising

I dare say the producers of Spring Awakening won’t have too much difficulty finding something to quote from my review in their ads in The Times for the show, if that’s what they want to do. But you never know.

I’m told I’m usually such a miserable sod that favorable quotes from my reviews can be slim pickings. But even when I rave about a show, there’s room for improvement. For instance, I wrote in my review of Mr. McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which swims in more blood than the Jacobeans, that it was “the best bloody play I’ve ever seen.” In the Times ad, however, the “bloody” was dropped and the quote became “The best play I’ve ever seen.”

Well, if it helps …. But a friend of mine, who’s a playwright, called me up to complain that he thought he was the one who’d written the best play I’ve ever seen. So I got on to the press representatives of the show and said, “Hello, it’s me. Sorry to trouble you, but The Lieutenant of Inishmore isn’t the best play I’ve ever seen. That singular honor belongs to a friend of mine and to something called Lear. Why, The Lieutenant of Inishmore isn’t even Martin McDonagh’s best play.”

So they put back the “bloody.”

But a more recent example takes the strudel. In the Times blurb for the British import of Henry Green’s Nothing, the quote from my review was published proudly above the title as: “I’ve rarely had such a good time at the theater—John Heilpern, New York Observer.”

In fact, I wrote, “I’ve rarely had such a good time at the theater without enjoying myself.”

Still, I found the rewrite of my politely downbeat review so funny, I couldn’t bring myself to protest. I hope you weren’t misled by the ad that deserves an award for chutzpah.

Late Night With Conan O'Brien 's head writer, Jonathan Groff, is thinking over his options. He said he and his wife, Martha Chowning, are expecting a baby in June. He can't help wondering if he'll be able to keep up the pace of doing comedy on a deadline, four times a week. "We do a lot of character stuff, a lot of sketchy stuff that is difficult to generate," Mr. Groff said. "It's labor-intensive." So his plans are vague.

NYTV asked him what was up after a little bird tweeted to us that he might leave the show before September, which would mark his fifth year as head writer.

"I actually don't know exactly what my deal is," he said.

Mr. Groff ended up writing for Conan O'Brien after doing brief stints writing for The Jon Stewart Show (its MTV incarnation), followed by a gig writing for Comedy Central's Short Attention Span Theater . Before moving to New York in 1993, Mr. Groff did standup in Boston.

Mr. Groff was brought onto Late Night after submitting a packet of material that included a bit about a black a cappella quartet singing insulting things about Conan O'Brien in lush four-part harmony, which aired almost immediately after he was hired. Nine months later, he was promoted to head writer.

Mr. Groff said that in the event he does leave Late Night he won't be straying far; he has a deal with NBC (separate from Mr. O'Brien's own production deal with NBC) that includes developing sitcoms.

Tonight on Late Night : the guy who makes NYTV embarrassed to be liberal, Tim Robbins. [WNBC, 4, 12:35 A.M.]

Thursday, Mar. 9

Has a synergy deal ever looked sweeter? MTV Productions' Making the Band , a Real World -meets-Backstreet Boys reality show debuting March 24 on ABC, seems like a recipe for making money. First, you gather 25 racially diverse 19-year-old guys, all of them hot, all of them with an affinity for hair gel, and you put them through the rigors of a tryout for Lou Pearlman, the guy who concocted boy bands N'Sync and Backstreet Boys. Select the eight most talented fellas, toss them into a lake house in Orlando, Fla., and film them every moment. Next, simply shitcan the three kids who aren't fitting in and sign the remaining five boys to a big fat contract. Call them O-Town (after Orlando, duh ). Give ABC parent company Disney the option of releasing their records on their house label, Hollywood Records. Watch their reactions as they read in the papers about Mr. Pearlman's vicious legal battle with his old boy band, N'Sync.

Then, air 22 half-hour episodes detailing, as their press materials puts it, "their transformation from ordinary young men to rising pop stars," on ABC in prime time. Then just sit back and wait for the moment when every 11-year-old girl in America decides that O-Town so rocks . If it works, everybody wins. Network advertising revenue pays MTV to produce a show that advertises a Disney product. Heck, the guys could even check out Disney World in a very special episode. The capper would be that MTV would air O-Town's videos, a necessary part of breaking a band.

Not so fast!

"The synergy is not as high as you'd think," said Ken Mok, president of MTV Productions and the executive producer of Making the Band . He came up with the concept last August while in New York for meetings at MTV's Times Square headquarters. On that trip he found himself unable to maneuver past the screaming girls waiting to get a glimpse of N'Sync, who were appearing on MTV's Total Request Live .

After selling a full season of the show to ABC, Mr. Mok rang up the guys behind Total Request Live and asked about booking O-Town on the show for a little publicity head start. But guess what?

"I've gotten surprising resistance," said Mr. Mok.

According to Mr. Mok, MTV programmers told him that O-Town songs would receive no special consideration, and that when and if O-Town ever made it onto Total Request Live , it would be after hitting it big elsewhere.

Today, on Total Request Live , Smashing Pumpkins, desperately seeking audience. [MTV, 20, 3:30 P.M.]

Friday, Mar. 10

Tonight, there's 16th Annual Soap Opera Awards . Winners are chosen by rabid fans who vote for their favorite shows. Michael Logan, who has covered the daytime scene for TV Guide the last 10 years, gave us his predictions:

"The shows that do well are the shows that get their fans out of their couches. Historically, the Procter & Gamble shows do very poorly because the audiences for CBS shows are older and more conservative, and they don't tend to get out and vote."

According to Mr. Logan, the two front-runners are General Hospital on ABC and Days of Our Lives on NBC.

" General Hospital has had a bad year," Mr. Logan said. "It's been very, very piss-poor dramatically, and they've lost a lot of talent. It's in pathetic shape, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything to the hard-core fan. On the other hand, there have been examples where you can see that the audience has turned on the show. That happened about three years ago when Days of Our Lives was overtaken by General Hospital . Will that happen this year with General Hospital ? It's hard to say, but it could."

Thanks, Mr. Logan. You're not looking for another gig by any chance, are you? There's a certain column here that's up for grabs. [WNBC, 4, 9 P.M.]

Saturday, Mar. 11

The antidote to sportscaster idiocy, ladies and gentlemen, is Deb Kaufman, the anchor of MSG's nuts-and-bolts sports news program, Sports Desk . Ms. Kaufman's unaffected, shtickless, girl-next-door approach to reporting the sports news is a refreshing break from the frat-house humor of ESPN.

"It took me a couple of years to figure out how to be the same way on the air as I am sitting in the newsroom," Ms. Kaufman said. "We'll sit in the newsroom and have great discussions about what we think about sports, but it took me a couple of years to figure out how to do it on the air."

Who's her sportscasting hero? Marv Albert, of course.

"Marv is the best. Especially on the radio. From a critical point of view, he has the perfect voice and tone. He brings the right level of angst and excitement. If you listen to one of his calls, he always has the perfect explanation of time on the clock, what the situation is, and he creates the right level of tension for the listener. His calls stand the test of time. To listen to one of his calls, it's amazing."

Know this. If you watch Ms. Kaufman in action, you'll never go back to Sports Center . [MSG, 27, 10:30 P.M.]

Sunday, Mar. 12

Pop-Up Video co-creator Tad Low crashed the stage of the TV Guide Awards on March 5. But that was apparently just the capper to an extraordinarily debauched week in Los Angeles.

For those billions and billions of people who did not catch Fox's TV Guide Awards , Mr. Low stormed the stage when MTV's Total Request Live –and not Pop-Up Videos –was announced as favorite musical show.

"Hi, everybody," he said into the microphone during this live broadcast. "I'm Tad–I'm the producer of Pop-Up Video , and this is a travesty! L.A. does lead the nation in robberies, and you can add one more to tonight's festivities! What is this Total Request Live ? It just asks softball questions to celebrities, talks to them when they're in the shower. Come on! Seriously! Let me have the award."

Behind him on the stage was Total Request Live host Carson Daly, a handsome fellow who looked hip, albeit in a corny way. He was surrounded by a posse of other MTV guys who also looked hip in the corniest way possible. They were wearing black suits and neckties that shone, like Regis Philbin after his Who Wants to Be a Millionaire makeover. They all looked around 28 years old and had gunk in their hair.

Mr. Low looked comical, with crazy short hair, open collar and manic stage presence. Turning to the MTV host, he said, "Carson? Where are you? Come on! Don't you think I should take the award? Come on, people!"

They took Mr. Low away. Had he made TV history? Well, at least it was a decent attempt.

Mr. Low called NYTV the afternoon after his stunt to report that his arms were feeling "fucking sore" from being whisked away by security men and that he was "still a little bit drunk" from a trip to a strip club called Crazy Girls.

On March 4, Mr. Low said, he and a friend who is "a bit of a pothead but also a licensed pilot" did parabolic dives over southern California to approximate NASA's famous zero-G "vomit comet." He said it was scary. But in the week before the TV Guide awards, Mr. Low was taking meetings, doing biz .

See, last September, Mr. Low decided to take a few days off and go on a little trip to the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert. He ended up taking leave from his production company, Spin the Bottle, for three months.

"I took some killer acid called 2CB," he said. "It was good."

Before he knew it, he was in Georgia–no, not that one, but the one in the former Soviet Union. Then he turned up in Laos. He didn't get back to New York until New Year's Day. And what ever happened to that two-year development deal he'd signed with ABC? While he was traveling, the two years ran out! Without ABC producing any of his shows!

So now Mr. Low's got all these ideas without homes. Recently he pitched them to Fox and UPN. Here's a sampling:

Scars : Real people go on show, tell story of worst scar. Cut to America's Most Wanted -like dramatic re-creation of scar-causing event (breaking glass, biting dog). Then studio audience chants, "Show … us … your … scar!" Guest shows scar.

The Wad : This show would be The Sopranos meets Who Wants to Be a Millionaire . "Pimpish asshole with way too much money" drives into various small American towns in white Cadillac with huge wad of hundreds in pocket. Makes locals do "stupid shit because he can."

First Impression : Physiognomy game show. Guests come out and remain silent while contestants try to guess personality just from looking at their faces and bodies.

Take a lesson from the real wad-bearers on The Sopranos tonight. [HBO, 32, 9 P.M.]

Monday, Mar. 13

Tonight, on Ally McBeal , it's a rerun, with Haley Joel Osment guest-starring as an 8-year-old dying of leukemia. There will surely be lots of tears, but not as many as Mr. Osment shed at this year's Golden Globe Awards when he learned he hadn't won. [WNYW, 5, 9 P.M.]

Tuesday, Mar. 14

From Larry King's March 6 USA Today column, which partly chronicles his trip to South Africa: "I saw the South African version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire . In South Africa, the million is in terms of the rand (about six to a dollar). Jeremy Maggs is Johannesburg's answer to Regis Philbin. He's an excellent host. The set is the same, the rules are the same, and the show is just as popular there as here. Maggs wears lighter clothing, however. Maybe that dark metallic look doesn't work in South Africa." [WABC, 7, 8 P.M.]

Mr. Groff said the writers collaborate at times, but "the really inspired ideas come out of one person sitting down and working through it." Lots of jokes live and die in the writers room, he added. "Sometimes we'll warm up, cracking the rudest or most obvious joke. It's kind of like batting practice: You swing at big wide pitches to begin with and, hopefully, you can hit at the better pitches later." …

On average, the writers work from 10:30 A.M. till 11:30 P.M., writing, producing and editing four or five comedy bits. "Because of Conan's background and Robert Smigel, who was the original head writer, it was created as a sketch show that's also a talk show," said Mr. Groff, "so the sketches can be fully developed things. And people notice it. We've tried to be distinctive and we try to be ambitious … It's a knowing show that couldn't exist without irony, but, and this sounds highfalutin, it's post-ironic in a way … We try to commit to stuff; we try to avoid the joke that there is no joke." [WNBC, 4, 12:35 A.M.]

-By Deirdre Dolan

Among the five best films ever made is Jean Renoir's 1939 tragic-romantic comedy, The Rules of the Game [Friday, Nov. 21, Bravo, 64, 3:30 P.M.; Saturday, Nov. 22, 11 A.M.] , which in its original French release was so despised by press and public that some of the opening-night audience pulled out seats and threw them at the screen; the picture was then heavily recut, yet still barely seen. Renoir fled in fury and heartbreak to the United States, where he was resident the rest of his life. The film lay forgotten until the 50's, when it was discovered by the French New Wave filmmakers and critics, and subsequently restored by them in 1959 to its original uncut version. Since then, The Rules of the Game has become an acknowledged work of genius, taste, visionary perception, tragic size; it is as airy and heavy, as filled with light and shadows, as the shimmering Mozart music that opens the movie. An extraordinarily prescient look at upper-middle-class society on the brink of World War II, it contains probably the single greatest line in pictures (rough translation): "There's only one terrible thing in life, which is that everyone has their own good reasons." And the line is thrown away in long shot by Renoir, the director himself playing an artist-the saintly, benevolent, conciliatory artist-who nevertheless sets in motion the series of events that culminate in death. The essentially casual, underplayed, lightly paced manner, with even some dark physical comedy, belies the profoundly serious nature of the piece, vivified by an indelible sequence of astonishingly savage bird and rabbit slaughter. Yet all this is a reflection not only of the approaching catastrophe of 1939-1945, but also of the brutality of class relations during a weekend party at the mansion of a wealthy and adulterous young couple, surrounded by sycophants and lovers. That this still amazingly relevant masterwork was so violently misunderstood in its own day only proves that the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on shortsightedness.

-By Peter Bogdanovich