Michael Chernus and Pierce.

After suffering through the massacre of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, I thought I had seen the dregs of the New York theater season. I was wrong. Things reach the absolute nadir of abysmal incompetence with the new Manhattan Theatre Club production at the City Center of a dopey, pretentious travesty called Close Up Space.

The almost always watchable David Hyde Pierce stars as Paul Barrow, the harassed editor in chief of a small but distinctive publishing house called Tandem Books. The setting is the place where he works. You know the place. One of those elegant, brick-walled offices tastefully decorated with Oriental carpets, walnut shutters, Moroccan bound books, and a bubbling fish tank that is more placid and easygoing than the human life reflected in the glass. In fact, the life it mirrors is worse than the violent ward at Bellevue.

When Mr. Pierce gets the right role as the contemporary embodiment of the near-sighted, addlepated Magoos that used to be played by Marion Lorne, there is nobody funnier. (There’s also some Wally Cox in there, and a smidge of Ed Wynn trying to get out.) From Frasier to the Kander and Ebb musical Curtains, he has proved he can do lots of other things, too, but I like him best when he’s falling apart. Alas, alas, there is nothing playable in the miserable detritus of Close Up Space, a nonplay by a Brooklyn writer named Molly Smith Metzler, woefully lost without a compass by the direction of Leigh Silverman. It is both incomprehensible and awful, often at the same time.

No wonder Mr. Pierce seems to have difficulties keeping his eyelids open. He has been given nothing to do and nothing important enough to say that enlightened people want to hear. Tightened up in button-down collars and horn-rimmed spectacles, Paul is an aging preppie, pedantic to the point of obsession, talking about compound verbs, expletives and illiterate syntax while he edits everything from hard-copy manuscripts to personal mail. Among the many contrived distractions that plague him are a best-selling writer (a wasted and largely unintelligible Rosie Perez) who is in a rage because he’s red-penciled her new book to the point where it looks like “a used maxi-pad”; a demented office manager named Steve (Michael Chernus) who lives in a tent and cooks bacon in a frying pan in the middle of the floor wearing only a bathrobe; and a daughter named Bailey (Jessica DiGiovanni) who, after being expelled from college, arrives in an astrakhan hat waving a Russian flag and throwing snowballs. The writer grows and eats nothing but fiddlehead ferns. The daughter is moving to Russia because she has never recovered from the death of her mother, who sprayed the house red wearing combat boots and committed suicide. When Paul is out, she empties the office of its contents (she must subscribe to Wonder Woman), babbling away in Russian and going from unconventional tyrant to total mental patient overnight. In the end, Paul climbs into Steve’s tent for a while, but in the end he is shivering in the middle of the Soviet steppes as the snow falls, like the last scene in Anna Karenina. This is what comes of “exclusive” publishers who print too many books on Egyptian hieroglyphics and 100 ways to cook asparagus that nobody wants to read, and Close Up Space is what comes of producing too many horrible plays at the Manhattan Theatre Club that nobody wants to see. Very little of it is engrossing and a great deal of it is just plain savagely stupid. I mean how can one play be overwritten and pointlessly empty at the same time?

The fact that this gibberish made it beyond one public performance is a testament to the sustaining power of membership subscriptions. The only good thing about Close Up Space is the fact that it is 90 minutes long without intermission. The praise ends there.

rreed@observer.com

Nixon (Getty Images)

Cynthia Nixon returns to Broadway in a play that--unlike her Tony-winning turn in Rabbit Hole, which went on to win a Pulitzer--is already Pulitzer-anointed. Ms. Nixon is to play Dr. Vivian Bearing, an English scholar dying of cancer, the Manhattan Theatre Club announced today. (It's a familiar topic for Ms. Nixon, who's currently in the Showtime cancer comedy The Big C.) Could this be Tony number two for Ms. Nixon after the show opens on January 26, 2012--and could it be Tony number one for the show, which has never played on Broadway?

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The Tempest unfolds on the island to which Prospero, the rightful duke of Milan, has been banished with his daughter, Miranda, by his usurping brother, Antonio. At the center of Tom Piper’s set is a lonely swath of sand, closed in at the far side by a very shallow pool of water—the vast ocean that keeps Prospero captive on the island. Sometimes Paul Pyant’s moody lights hit that water just so, leaving a shimmering reflection on the horizonlike concrete wall at the back. The whole thing is breathtaking—as is the first entrance of Caliban, the play’s half-monster slave, arising through the stage floor, climbing out from the sand.

But while the design is restrained and lovely, the performance can seem just restrained. Stephen Dillane plays Prospero not as a commanding, entitled duke—the sort who, in seeking vengeance against his enemies 12 years after his exile, creates a violent storm, a tempest, as they sail past his island, to force them ashore—but rather as a thoughtful, reluctant leader and doting father. And Mr. Mendes’ directorial flourishes can sometimes be distracting: As Prospero circles the spot of sand early in the play—and circles, and circles, and circles—it becomes challenging to follow what he’s saying.

This Tempest is a thrill to look at, but it’s a bit less impressive to see.

Meanwhile, in midtown, the Manhattan Theatre Club is offering a glimpse at an imagined behind-the-scenes Will Shakespeare in Bill Cain’s fascinating and very funny Equivocation, which opened last night at MTC’s Off Broadway space in City Center.

Shakespeare—here called Shagspeare, perhaps to avoid four-century-old trademark infringement—has been summoned by Sir Robert Cecil, a top adviser to King James I, and ordered to write “a true history of the present,” an account of the just-foiled Gunpowder Plot to kill the king and his court. He’s reluctant to take the job—how can you be an artist and pursue the truth when you’re obligated to tell the king’s version of the story?—but also has no choice. As the play proceeds, Shag and his troupe, the King’s Men, wrestle with the commission, with truth and art and language and politics, before finally giving up on the Gunpowder Plot and instead debuting Macbeth—the Scottish play for the Scottish King.

Garry Hynes directs a very strong ensemble, with most of the actors playing multiple roles and often moving amusingly among them. John Pankow, the nebbishy sitcom star who even onstage tends to play sitcommy roles, is an unexpectedly excellent Shagspeare, intelligent and thoughtful and affecting.

The play is a history lesson, and a comedy, full of theater jokes and Shakespeare jokes, but more than anything, it is an intriguing and powerful meditation on language and the uses and misuses of it. Shagspeare visits a convicted Gunpowder conspirator, the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet, in the Tower of London, where Garnet speaks of the doctrine of equivocation he espouses—“how to speak the truth in difficult times.” It is, essentially, to be clever. “I want to tell the truth,” Shag tells Garnet. “I just don’t want to get caught at it.”

Equivocation is a warning about people in power who insist on their own truths—and it’s a passionate argument for telling the real truth, even in difficult times.
joxfeld@observer.com

Rarely has any woman-least of all a nun-enraged me so much. Yet if anything, I'm sentimental about nuns, as Mr. Shanley is in his dedication to his play:

"The play is dedicated to the many orders of Catholic nuns who devoted their lives to serving other hospitals, schools and retirement homes. Though they have been much maligned and ridiculed, who among us has been so generous?"

We would expect, then, that Mr. Shanley would have us sympathize with Sister Aloysius in Doubt, though we know the dramatist is too fine a writer to see life in simplistic black-and-white terms. The Sister accuses a popular and apparently innocent priest at her school of molesting a child. Where's the truth? Whose side will we take?

But, far from seeing Mr. Shanley's Sister Aloysius as a good and caring woman, or even a godly woman who might be mistaken, I saw her as a moral disgrace from the start. Her fearsome backbone is meant to impress, but she demeans all charity and kindness. Every flinty word of Christian conviction that I was meant to admire from of her sanctimoniously pursed lips enraged me. Blame the frighteningly steely performance of Cherry Jones with her arms crossed into her black habit in permanent accusation! But I hadn't a shred of doubt about the rights and wrongs of Sister Aloysius' witch hunt against her fellow priest-and surely I was meant to? She's blind bigotry wrapped in a nun's habit.

True, the audience appeared to find her a likable "character" at first, like any "strict but fair" schoolteacher who knows a thing or two. "Innocence is a form of laziness," she announces typically to simpering Sister James (the very appealing Heather Goldenhersh). "Innocent teachers are easily duped. You must be canny, Sister James."

"But I want to feel my students can talk to me," she pleads naïvely.

"They're children," comes the emphatic reply inviting no response. "They can talk to each other. It's more important they have a fierce moral guardian. You stand at the door, Sister. You are the gatekeeper. If you are vigilant, they will not need to be."

Mr. Shanley has caught her voice of unarguable conviction brilliantly. One knows her type, you think with a shudder. A "character," though? A nun capable of sweet reason? For one malign thing, the old bat kills Sister James' enthusiasm and innocence. Her first words of any consequence to her are the joyless pronouncement: "Art. Waste of time." She could be an unsweet Jean Brodie ("Chrysanthemums, such serviceable flowers!")

But still, Sister Aloysius is meant to be a saintly representative of the church! A fierce protector of moral values! The kind of dedicated teacher and worthy nun-"much maligned and ridiculed," as Mr. Shanley puts it, asking "who among us has been so generous?"

And to that I would respond: many, many people.

Doubt is set in 1964 in St. Nicholas Church School in the Bronx, and Mr. Shanley has partly drawn on the genre of topical conscience plays that leave us with Food for Thought. To strike a note of old-fashioned cynicism, the production directed by Doug Hughes is made for a Broadway transfer: It's short (90 minutes without intermission); the quartet of actors led by Ms. Jones is first-rate; its theme-priestly child abuse-is timely; and we're left with a little something To Chew On (e.g., Is absolute certainty a balm to doubt? Or did the priest really do it?).

In its central standoff between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn, the teacher she accuses of molesting a black choirboy, Doubt is a modern relative of David Mamet's infuriating 1994 psychodrama of sexual harassment, Oleanna. The question is who we believe, and what prejudices are ignited in us along the way. As you can tell, my prejudice against Sister Aloysius shows. But she gives me no choice. The same flaw spoils both Mr. Shanley's drama and Mr. Mamet's, however. Mr. Mamet's neurotic female student has as flimsy a case against her teacher as Mr. Shanley's vigilant nun against her priest.

Astonishingly, Sister Aloysius never reveals even a shred of evidence against the accused priest. She acts on faith and takes faith too far. She "suspects"; she feels it in her bones; she "knows" these things. But she cannot prove it for a second. Furthermore, she has a motive: She dislikes the young Father Flynn's modern teaching ideas and sermons. (One of them is a parable of doubt: "Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.")

But Father Flynn is unshakable. The terrific, humane Brian F. O'Byrne-who could even make a murder-rapist sympathetic in Frozen, for which he won a Tony-has reason to splutter in bewildered indignation here. His Father is innocent as day. I knew a caring teacher like him. We all did. We were lucky.

You can accuse anyone of anything. And something, some mud, some small doubt, will stick. But even the boy's mother (the fourth fine performance of the evening, from Adriane Lenox) doesn't agree with her son's "protector." In her determination to damn the teacher, Sister Aloysius would damn the boy, too. The priest's reputation-his name, all he stands for-are of no consequence to her. She will even lie to prove "the truth" about him.

"In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God," she explains glibly.

That is what all religious fanatics do. And my doubt about Doubt is a serious one. I could see nothing positive in Sister Aloysius, only her blindness and bigotry and injustice. She's no teacher, no maligned nun. She's dangerous and she's godless. When she begs pathetically for our sympathy with the melodramatic curtain line-"I have doubts! I have such doubts!"-she leaves us cold. We are not saints, and our sympathy has long since been forfeited.

Tenn's One-Acts

The pleasure of Tennessee Williams' company in Five by Tenn at the Manhattan Theatre Club is partly ghostly. The ghost of Williams is embodied elegantly by Jeremy Lawrence, who acts as our wry host and the drawling dramatist himself. And there are the five, mostly unknown pieces by our national poet of bruised hearts that inhabit the stage as ghostly reminders of the uncertain, playful talent of Williams' youth and of the wretched despair of the mature playwright.

Some of plays have been recently discovered, and all are being seen in New York for the first time. Minor-key they might be, but the pseudo-controversy over whether they demean Williams' reputation is misplaced. The umpteenth mediocre revival of, say, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof does real harm. But under the sensitive direction of Michael Khan, the opportunity to see these lost one-act plays make an intriguing portrait of a great artist.

The opening sketch of the young man and his suffocating mother in Summer at the Lake from 1937 is the prototype for trapped Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie of 1944. The Fat Man's Wife turns out to be an early, lovelorn pastiche of Cowardesque romantic desire, of all sophisticated, unsexy things. Adam and Eve on a Ferry (1939) is a surprising comic doodle, a curiosity piece about an elderly woman in search of sensual love and D. H. Lawrence (who was one of Williams' literary influences).

But Williams wrote about the human heart and laid it bare, and his 1959 And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens is an astonishing story about a touching, young New Orleans property owner and transvestite (given a smashing performance by Cameron Folmar) who bribes and seduces a hard-drinking heterosexual sailor into living with him for a while. Tell Sad Stories is less about erotic sexual fantasy, perhaps, than the desperate need for companionship in a community of dangerous freedom.

I Can't Imagine Tomorrow was written in 1970, when Williams could scarcely bring himself to write any more. It's a heartbroken poem, perfectly performed by Kathleen Chalfant and David Rasche, about two people who reach out to the other in the pain of being alive. The haunting, emotional reference to "Dragon Country" is unmistakably the Williams whose self-described "blue devils" sank him into terrible despair. Yet the play's tragic message might be Beckett's: "I can't go on. I must."

"Are you asleep?" the woman says to the man softly. "Are you asleep now?"

"I can't imagine tomorrow," comes the answer.

What a thing not to imagine. It takes our breath away. And by then, for Tennessee Williams, there was no escape.

I've had my say, so I won't dwell on it. The folks at the Manhattan Theatre Club claim they've no intention of compromising their high standards at the Biltmore-and what could be better proof than their risky inaugural production of Richard Greenberg's time-play, The Violet Hour ? Yes (though time will tell). But for me, Mr. Greenberg's messy, overreaching drama is just the sort of nutty play that would have been much better off staged at one of Manhattan Theatre Club's remaining, more modest theaters at City Center, where the glare of Broadway expectations don't exist and the values are different and more understanding. As it is, reviewers have mostly clobbered The Violet Hour , though for different reasons.

A word about the newly opened theater itself: The renovation of the M.T.C.'s Biltmore, dark since 1987, cost many millions. On the one hand, it's always good to see a derelict theater back in business. But they've restored the past and neglected the future. How much more exciting would it have been had they built a theater for the new millennium within the shell of the crumbling old Biltmore! A theater of the future would even be capable of transforming the shape of its auditorium according to the needs of each production. Like the terrific new Zankel Hall in the bowels of Carnegie Hall, it could be highly flexible, not formally static, mutatingly experimental or traditional. Built in 1925, the Biltmore essentially remains a 19th-century theater from the past: a proscenium arch space lovingly restored rather than re-invented.

Keep in mind, though, the belief that in the end, good work will always shine wherever it plays! I've literally seen new plays performed inside a derelict railway yard (a perfect theater in the semi-round) and in the middle of the Sahara Desert (a perfect empty space)-and all ultimately lives or dies depending on what's performed rather than where. Ultimately, it all comes down to the show . And so, to Mr. Greenberg's Violet Hour .

As his F. Scott Fitzgerald character, Denny, puts it: "The really big problem with the Broadway theater today is you always know what's going to happen." Mr. Greenberg's smarty-pants sentiment is true enough, and the characters in his time-bending play are actually about to see a typical Broadway production. The playwright is tipping us off that his own play isn't predictable. Life is predictable! I think. For if anyone can figure out exactly what the unfortunately scattershot, windy playwright is saying in The Violet Hour , they deserve a free ride on H.G. Wells' time machine.

I must say that I wish I could place Mr. Greenberg, as his admirers do, in the same league as Tony Kushner when it comes to the theater of ideas and language. I'm afraid that his gay baseball saga, Take Me Out , struck me as a contrived melodrama drowning in "Greenbergspeak." His use of language is archly mannered, seeming impressive. Words and ideas tumble out of him giddily, becoming unglued. Which baseball player can say of a homophobic lout-as Mr. Greenberg has him say in Take Me Out -that he "reveals a congeries of reprehensible social attitudes"? Oh, phooey! (Oh, congeries!) Nobody talks this way, except Mr. Greenberg.

Perceived as an intellectual, he's a fertile and talented writer who rambles unchecked. His eloquence is overwrought, overheated. Hence this typically bloated exchange early in The Violet Hour :

"I believe in the novel of inclusion," announces Denny, the young aspiring writer. "In the argument between Wells and James, I'm a decided Wellsian."

"You're more McClearyan than either," his potential publisher replies, "and that's not yet a finished thing …. " It sounds good! (It sounds Stoppardian.) It's just gas . Mr. Greenberg's pretentious themes in The Violet Hour -predominantly the near-melancholic, twilight blur between past, present and future, or the struggle between free will, determinism and identity-flicker into occasional promise, but he reveals an approximate mind that too frequently loses focus. It was this same carelessness that characterized his 2001 drama Everett Beekin , about American Jewish life from 1940's New York to late-1990's California . While the first act dealt with a familiar picture-Jews living on the Lower East Side in 1947-it somehow neglected to mention the Holocaust. Not even the imminent foundation of Israel intruded on the coziness of it all. Mr. Greenberg had let his story about the slow drip of assimilation, or whether the goy gets the Jewish girl, run away with the play until it was finally overwhelmed in a conclusion about time passing that proved so densely complicated, it was almost impossible to understand.

The Violet Hour takes place in 1919, in the mess of a young publisher's office. Four of its five characters are transparently based on historic figures: on the cultivated publisher Maxwell Perkins, who's uncertainly starting out in his illustrious career; F. Scott Fitzgerald, here an aspiring novelist in love with a dreamy, spoilt, potentially mad Zelda figure; and Josephine Baker, the play's model for an older black chanteuse with a tale to tell.

The plot-whose twist involves a mysterious machine that prints out the future-revolves around the question of which book the decent, fledgling publisher, John Pace Seavering, will publish: the ludicrously long first novel of his Princeton chum, Denis McCleary, whose heiress fiancée, Rosamund, will kill herself unless it's published; or the memoirs of Seavering's secret mistress, the famous black entertainer Jessie Brewster. Seavering might also have the unspoken hots for Denis, or vice versa. But let's not go into that now.

The Violet Hour's fifth character is the publisher's embittered, campy assistant, who remains anonymously lost to history. It's painful to report that Mr. Greenberg has created only a showbiz stereotype of a screaming queen. I assume the character named Gidger (played by Mario Cantone at the top of his lisping voice) is meant to be amusing. But the dramatist surely didn't intend him to be that woeful, mincing invention of our time, a queer pet for the straight guy. It's an extraordinary lapse.Frankly, Gidger's an embarrassment to everyone.

Anyway, he finds the machine outside Seavering's door that magically spews out thousands of pages from books published in the future. Seavering learns what will happen to himself and his friends! And unpredictable life, Mr. Greenberg appears to be saying, thus becomes as predictable as the usual commercial potboiler on Broadway.

True! The problem with the scatty, Jazz Age Violet Hour is that more or less everything that happens in it is predictable, including its romance-novel melodrama, the ruin of its Scott and Zelda, the self-destruction of its Josephine Baker, and the whimsy of its mysteriously futuristic printing machine.

Directed by Evan Yionoulis, the production has been elegantly designed with sets by Christopher Barreca and costumes by Jane Greenwood. The small cast, capably led by Robert Sean Leonard, went through two very public cast changes before the shaky opening at the Biltmore. Robin Miles, in particular, having taken over the demanding Josephine Baker role with just two weeks' notice, should be proud of her work. Richard Greenberg's play is another story.

You'll appreciate the technical problems. For one lunatic thing, the actors appearing on Stage I in House have to run like blazes through the corridors backstage to make it on cue for their lines in Garden , which, with luck, is happening on Stage II. Unless, of course, they lose their way in the rush and end up as surprise guest artists at the City Center ballet.

There's a very intriguing line in Suzan-Lori Parks' Pulitzer-winning Topdog/Underdog that has fascinated me since I first heard it: "Does the show stop when no one's watching, or does the show go on?" Thanks to Mr. Ayckbourn, we now have the answer. The show goes on when the show's next-door.

Both of Mr. Ayckbourn's plays must start and end at exactly the same time. Intermission must happen at the same time. And it rains in both plays at the same time. Only the audiences in each theater are different. This is due to the fact that we can't be in two places at the same time. Actors can; actors are peculiar people. They live by entrances and exits, and Mr. Ayckbourn has decided to see what he can do with them.

Now as I see it, if there's a problem with Mr. Ayckbourn, the Bard of the English middle class, it's that he might have a little too much time on his hands. Not that it appears that way for a second, considering his phenomenal output as a whole. If there's been a more prolific dramatist, he must be dead by now. Mr. Ayckbourn is 63, and he's written some 60 plays. I'm no mathematician, but by my reckoning that's one play a year since he was 3 years old.

In fact, it's little known that he wrote his first juvenilia when he was 2, during which time he created two interlocking, now lost plays entitled Crib and Stroller .

Theater scholars have established beyond reasonable doubt that Master Ayckbourn performed his own light drawing-room comedy Crib in his playpen, while his more traditional farce, Stroller , was performed simultaneously by Nanny in the maid's room next-door.

The intriguing thing is that Nanny also appeared in Crib even as she appeared in Stroller . The 2-year-old Ayckbourn already had the technique down pat. At precisely the right moment, Nanny casually exited Stroller on the line, "I wonder who can be making that noise over yonder hills. I'll just have a look." Whereupon, bang on cue, trouper that she was, she entered Crib to deliver the immortal line, "Who da boo-boo?"

Dialogue ensued, until it was time for dear old Nanny to return to the action in Stroller , lest she keep the audience waiting too long. Her exit line was a tease: "It never rains but it pours. Best get the brolly and a stethoscope." And, in a flash, she crossed the hallway to re-enter Crib with another of Master Ayckbourn's early sidesplitters: "I don't care what anyone says. Cucumbers don't grow on trees."

I wonder: Do these surviving fragments from the 2-year-old Ayckbourn's lost masterwork contain the formula for his House and Garden 60 years later? They do. Watching House (which takes place in the drawing room of a Georgian house), if you keep your eye on who exits into the garden, you might be able to guess what's happening across the way. You might think to yourself, "Is anything better going on in the garden?" It doubles your potential pleasure that way. Giles and Joanna, whose marriage we know has hit trouble, don't appear much in House . Bet they're having a right old cat fight in Garden . The alcoholic French movie star who arrives for a boozy lunch in House before opening the garden fête next-door surely promises knockabout farce elsewhere. Then there's the rain -solid, reliable English rain, coming down in buckets-destined, you might imagine, to make a soggy comic washout round the Maypole.

It's new to see an actor come skidding to a halt as he enters onstage, while others enter extra casually , as if saying to us, "Everything's quite, quite normal. We didn't rush." As a whole, the cast handles the logistics so smoothly that I began to wonder how difficult it really is for them to get from one stage to another. It's a test, of course. But at the Royal National Theatre, where House and Garden premiered at two of its three theaters, actors still get lost in the maze backstage, and it isn't unknown for an actor to enter the wrong play. A while ago, preparing a piece about London theater, I followed Fiona Shaw from her dressing room to her entrance on the stage of the Cottesloe Theatre. She was playing Shakespeare's boy-king, Richard II. Here's her passage from reality to fantasy:

Exit room 010, crown upon head. Turn left along the corridor, past a telephone box. Go through swing doors by the windowless rehearsal room. Turn right through swing doors. Left through next set of swing doors. Left again for 25 yards. Past the giant elevator that takes scenery up to the Olivier theater. Do not turn right through swing doors facing you. Turn right to STAGE RIGHT.

Enter the King.

Still, whatever else is going on backstage at the Manhattan Theatre Club-dashing next-door, reading a thriller, yoga exercises, snacking on chocolate biscuits-perhaps we ought to mention what's happening onstage. Oh, that .

In House , a wealthy industrialist named Teddy, who's an upper-middle-class buffoon, is in line to become a conservative member of Parliament. His wife, the unhappy but wise Trish, hasn't spoken to him for weeks because he's a buffoon who's unfaithful with his best friend's wife, Joanna. Teddy's teen daughter, rebellious schoolgirl Sally, doesn't speak to him, either. Jake, adolescent son of Joanna, has a crush on Sally. The well-connected novelist and pedophile, snaky Gavin Ryng-Mayne, arrives for lunch to persuade Teddy to run for Parliament. Sweet, ineffectual Giles and philandering Joanna briefly appear; also three mad people, one with a knife. "Mayhem ensues," as the publicity handouts put it, when the alcoholic French film star, sexy-sexy Lucille Cadeau, arrives to open the garden fête.

Garden is mostly about the marital trials of Joanna and Giles, the bumbling caterers, a difference of opinion between teens Sally and Jake, the three mad people, the rainstorm, a collapsing tent, a Maypole gone wrong and Lucille, the sexy-sexy French film star who's too sloshed to open the fête.

Each play stands on its own, and I'm afraid that House was enough for me. I felt, unfairly perhaps, that I'd already seen at least some of Garden . But I've seen House before, too, in a thousand traditional English drawing-room comedies, a good number of them written by Mr. Ayckbourn. Life and love and how awfully difficult it all can be is a familiar message of his, and his comic types are fairly predictable here. There are moments . Jan Maxwell and Bryce Dallas Howard shine, but the cast can be uneven, even un-English. The director and logistician is John Tillinger, who unfortunately encourages a parody of the fine, upstanding middle classes of England, when nobody parodies the English better than the English themselves.

As I was saying, I know exactly where I stand on scientific matters. I stand shamefaced and headachy at the bottom of the class. As the wise man says: "It's all a mystery to me." Science and befuddlement are the passing Zeitgeist of today's drama. But my relief that David Auburn's Proof is less about its ballyhooed higher mathematics than the fragility of life and love was matched by my delight in his fine and tender play. Proof is sure to be Mr. Auburn's breakthrough drama. I would place it much higher than this season's PulitzerPrize–winning Dinner With Friends by Donald Margulies with its familiar thirtysomething drift into middle-aged mortality and moans. Proof surprises us with its aliveness and intelligent modesty, and we have not met these characters before. Mr. Auburn takes pleasure in knowledge. (Three of his four characters are scientists.) At the same time, he is unshowily fresh and humane, and he has written a lovely play.

Happily, too, Proof has been blessed with a brilliant production at the Manhattan Theatre Club. What successful plays on and off Broadway haven't been directed by Daniel Sullivan lately? He's on a roll. His memorable revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten gave us three of the greatest performances we could see under one roof. (He directed Dinner With Friends , too.) His quartet of actors in Proof is remarkably good, with Mary-Louise Parker at her luminous and grungy best as Catherine, the dropout daughter of a genius mathematician who went crazy. The four actors are so effortlessly natural it's as if they truly inhabit that ramshackle professor's house in Chicago designed by John Lee Beatty. We are, in other words, thoroughly absorbed in all that happens. But do not read any further, my friends, if you're likely to be troubled by my revealing one or two twists of the plot.

Still reading, eh? Well, one hopes . But my anxiety not to spoil the play for anyone is sincere, though Proof is no detective game (while its title implies one). Refreshingly, for one thing, it's about fathers and daughters with nary a whiff of incest even suggested. It is about pure love, as the play itself is about love and random discovery. Mary-Louise Parker and Larry Bryggman as Robert (Catherine's adored nutty father) play beautifully in all their scenes together. But their surprising, wonderfully acted scene that opens Proof amounts to a coup de théâtre .

Catherine, herself a mathematician who sacrificed her promising career to care for her sick dad, is seen on the porch looking as if she hasn't slept in a week or two. She might be cracking up. It's her 25th birthday. Her father, played by the brilliant Mr. Bryggman with the disheveled, springy, electric air of the manic, exhorts her not to give up. The wrecked, protective genius and the bright, wasted daughter have a Salingeresque feel to them. They might easily look for bananafish together. And as they talk, they slip into mathspeak as naturally as breathing. "You see?" the father cries delightedly. "Even your depression is mathematical." But Catherine's father has recently died. Her conversational connection to love and squalor-and sanity-is with him. The father's funeral is about to take place.

In comparison, the play-within-a-play that quite famously wrong-foots us in the opening scene of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing is merely a tricky device of Stoppardian cleverness. It doesn't touch us. But Mr. Auburn's gentle opening scene is genuine and genuinely surprising. He's too good to milk the dead father for easy sentimentality. But the father will appear again, I'm glad to say, "shuffling around like a … very smelly ghost" (as his daughter puts it) in time past and present.

Catherine's contemporary, Hal (played by Ben Shenkman), her father's former math protégé, is going through hundreds of his notebooks only to find them rambling nonsense written when he was mad. Mr. Shenkman is perfectly understated as the bungling math geek (and part-time rock drummer) who's in love with Catherine. "How embarrassing is it if I say last night was wonderful?" he asks her awkwardly. "It's only embarrassing," she replies, "if I don't agree."

The fourth character is Catherine's disliked sister, Claire, a pragmatic Wall Street type anxious to save Catherine from potential madness by taking her back with her to New York (which is a well-meaning idea that couldn't be more insane). Again, Johanna Day is exactly right as Claire with her bourgeois small talk and undercurrent of sibling rivalry. "The other day he made vegetarian chili!" she yammers about her future husband. "What the fuck are you talking about?" asks Catherine.

The plot turns on a question that I won't divulge, though for me the one flaw in Proof is that its resolution isn't really much in doubt. But there's a great deal to enjoy here, even for a math clod like me. Not least is the shared joy of discovery-call it truth, the "Eureka Moment"-that Proof has in common with Michael Frayn's drier Copenhagen . Arthur Koestler defined it as the ecstatic "aha!" (as opposed to "ho-hum"), which illuminates some shattering discovery that has been kissed by genius or God. Mr. Auburn is saying, in his elegant way, that the discovery of love is like this-and just as random, just as difficult to find. This young playwright has found his audience, and we are glad.

The Manhattan Theatre Club is risking a lot of late with its welcome program of new plays. More power to it! I much preferred my favorite Fuddy Meers , which premiered at M.T.C., to its admired The Tale of the Allergist's Wife by Charles Busch (soon to transfer to Broadway). Those are the odds with the shock-or disappointment-of the new. But I'm afraid its other new play, David Marshall Grant's Current Events , which has just opened on its small second stage, is overambitious.

Mr. Grant's first play, Snakebit , was well received, but his latest never makes up its mind what it wants to be: madcap dysfunctional family saga, coming-of-age play, coming-out play, political satire or serious moral discourse about compromise and cynicism in the age of Clinton. I was glad the cell phones were ringing onstage for once. But I regret that I didn't believe a word of Current Events , including its story about a future Democratic senator who hopes to get away with his dirty little secret: He may or may not have had an illegitimate son who-we can only suspect-might be his "nephew," the 15-year-old brat and closet homosexual who's been starving himself to death for nine days because, among other stuff, his adopted mother, a ditz and ex-model, has forgotten to buy him a Christmas tree. There's also an old-fashioned liberal, a rather sweet matriarch in a wheelchair who's meant to be an ogre and is fond of singing "Puff the Magic Dragon," and a young, somewhat sinister multimillionaire political assistant with lots of files who once wanted to be a hairdresser. The brat strongly suspects who his dad is. You do the math.

Yet March's quite renowned syncopated opening to his cult poem might be heralding nothing more debauched than a nursery rhyme:

Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still

And she danced twice a day in vaudeville.

Grey eyes.

Lips like coals aglow.

Her face was a tinted mask of snow.

As you may know, the first production of The Wild Party , with book, music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa, is at the Manhattan Theater Club. The second musical version has been adapted by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe, and is to open on Broadway next month.

Now there's a thing! Years ago in England, there were two simultaneous film versions of the Oscar Wilde story. Knowing England's obsession with Wilde, the surprise is that there weren't six other versions, at least. One starred Robert Morley as Wilde, the other Peter Finch. The feeling was that Finch was wrong but his film was right, whereas Morley was right but his film was wrong. It was a draw.

The Manhattan Theater Club's decision not to transfer its Wild Party to Broadway, as it had originally hoped to do, is probably prudent. (And we are spared the indignity of the Broadway battle of the parties.) The M.T.C. production, I'm afraid, has too many weaknesses to triumph on the jazzy, dangerous edge. Still it is a cut above the usual fare, even in its heartfelt desperation to please, to knock our socks off the old-fashioned way and raise the roof. But there's a gaping difference between March's chic decadence and Mr. Lippa's showbizzy version of it.

The heartbeat of the story is a tragic one: The heroine Queenie (played by Julia Murney) and her lover, the near-psychotic clown, Burrs (Brian d'Arcy James), throw a party for their debauched friends. They include Oscar and Phil, the twin brothers and incestuous lovers; Eddie the boxer and his equally dumb broad, Mae; Nadine, a minor; Delores, the hooker; Madelaine, the predatory dyke.

What else, may we ask, is new? There's also the cokehead and ex-whore Kate (Idina Menzel), who brings along the cool, handsome Black (Taye Diggs), a nightclub doorman. Black and Queenie fall in love; Kate makes a play for Burrs, who's obsessed with Queenie. The outcome is inevitable bloodshed.

The urge to play the story as melodrama has proved too tempting for its creator-composer, who has ambushed himself–and the production, alas–in sentimentality. One should not get soppy about sewers. (And March's original poem is clear-eyed about its hellishness.) Music pours out of the talented Mr. Lippa, but it is not always the right music. Here a touch of Sondheim in the night, there a rousing, cynical Kander and Ebb moment, and there again the big generic ballad of mighty emotion and small thought.

I thought I liked this man

And liked this place

But I've been feeling like

I need a change of pace.

"Too many notes!" the Emperor Joseph said famously of Mozart. Then perhaps I'm just as mistaken about Mr. Lippa by saying he has too many words. He's giddy-busy- dizzy with words. He drowns us in rhyme without reason. "Faintly/ Quaintly/ She looked almost saintly."

"Sensitive and hard/ One girl forever scarred."

"Generous and tight/ One more girl lost in the night." Generous and tight ?

Then again, in one line–a breathless gulp–he manages to rhyme vicious with wishes with ambitious with capricious with delicious. Which isn't so felicitous.

Ideally, the director, Gabriel Barre, should have reined in Mr. Lippa's excesses. Including the proforma showbiz turn of Kate as a cokehead version of gutsy Mama Rose in Gypsy . "Point me to the sky/ It's my turn to fly!" To which one snootily thinks, "Is it, indeed?" (Or worse: "Yeah, sure.")

Skip the scene when Kate sits on a toilet and takes a pee with convenient sound effects. See it as a shallow emblem. Too little in this Wild Party is truly earned–reducing its erotic potential, for blatant example, to the knee-jerk Bob Fosse reference book. If it's slither, it's Fosse. If it's dykedom, it's a suit. Hence, the old broad in a suit who sings about needing a good old-fashioned lesbian love story–an amusing novelty number, but in the wrong show, if truth be told.

Mr. Barre has achieved fine work with his scenic designer David Gallo and lighting designer Kenneth Posner, who've re-created the muddy, fractured subworld of the original poem very effectively. The cast all but knocks itself out for us, too. But in the end, I'm afraid, the piece is just too gooey at its soft, sentimental center, and all the tempting invitations to the party–"Time to have some fun, time to beat the sun!"–don't make it a wild one, more's the pity.

Tale of the Neurotic Wife

And so to the Manhattan Theater Club's Stage II production of Charles Busch's comedy of Upper West Side manners, The Tale of the Allergist's Wife , directed by Lynne Meadow. Let me tiptoe into the minefield by saying that many of my esteemed colleagues have found it to be as intelligently hilarious as any Stoppard, Neil Simon or Shaw comedy rolled into one, and I wish that I could join them. But The Tale of the Allergist's Wife struck me as a coarse kind of sitcom with only jokes about prunes missing from its Borsht Belt bathroom humor. That it should have come from the pen of that likable downtown drag artist, Mr. Busch, is the most surprising thing about it.

And by now, Ms. Meadow, who is also the artistic director of the Manhattan Theater Club, will, understandably, wish to have me killed. But if David Lindsay-Abaire's Fuddy Meers , the super comedy that began its mad life at M.T.C.'s Stage II, was fresh and young, Mr. Busch's comedy is stale and middle-aged. There's no youth in it–in the sense that Jewish stereotypes are invariably never youthful. The Catskills are in it instead.

It concerns neurotic Marjorie (Linda Lavin), an Upper West Side wannabe intellectual and failed novelist, who's in loud, nervous collapse after the death of her therapist. She is said to be the kind of pushy woman we might meet at Zabar's. She's the kind we avoid at Zabar's. It's like spending time with Judge Judy. Marjorie's husband is a schlumpy retired allergist, Ira (Tony Roberts); her mother from hell, Frieda (Shirl Bernheim), is the one with the bowel problems, announcing before dinner with the family: "For days I've had the worst diarrhea, just like brown liquid." Which gets laughs. As Marjorie puts it, "What do I know?" I know it isn't for me. It might just be for you. When Marjorie's delusional childhood friend Lee (Michele Lee)–who says she slept with Günter Grass–enters the unpleasantly bickering household, I perked up a bit. But my hopes were sunk with the retelling of a joke, which says more about Mr. Busch's wit than Mr. Busch would wish.

Ira, the allergist, tells a mildly amusing story about a child asking why a dog is standing behind another. "One dog is sick and the other is pushing her to Mount Sinai," goes the punch line.

Compare it to the original version by Noël Coward, which happens to be true. He was staying with the Oliviers when their 5-year-old daughter, Tamsin, saw a male dog sniffing a female dog in the street. She asked Uncle Noël what the animals were doing. "The doggie in front," he replied, "has suddenly gone blind, and the other one has very kindly offered to push him all the way to St. Dunstan's."

There's a difference, no?

never know . For instance, you might be strolling down Madison Avenue

on a Saturday afternoon and find yourself thinking: "I would love to

have a nice piece of fresh cod right now. It will make a lovely lunch with

boiled potatoes and garden peas. Easy on the butter."

And this is the thing: If, by chance, you have seen Captains

Courageous , the new fishing musical at the Manhattan Theater Club, you

will learn how to fish for the cod yourself in the sea. Try not to jerk the

fishing line in your excitement at a bite. You will lose the fish. It

happens all the time. It happens to the best.

Before you can fish for cod, however, it is necessary to locate the cod.

The same goes for sardines. As Treat Williams, who plays the wise, somewhat

simple-minded Portuguese fisherman Manuel, puts it in Captains

Courageous : "Dee feesh have meeting down below."

Manuel eez dee fahder Harvey never had. I don't know about his

mudder. Harvey, he lost his own fahder when he fell off an ocean liner in

to dee turbulent sea. Kindly Manuel, his savior, he even sing to dee feesh

thus: "Hey leetle feesh–are you passing by?/ So cold and dark in

the sea/ Come up and see the sunshine/ And pass some time with me."

Harvey is Harvey Ellesworth Cheyne, a horribly rich teenage brat played

by Brandon Espinoza, who was in Big . Captains Courageous , the

musical, is based on Captains Courageous , the novel, written by

Rudyard Kipling in 1897. It was also, quite famously, a 1937 movie with

Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew. And now it's a musical.

It shouldn't have been. The unacceptably snotty Harvey falls into

the sea to be rescued by the Portuguese Manuel and his salty shipmates on a

fishing trawler. Hence dee feeshing lessons. But as played by young

Espinoza, who I guess is about 14, Harvey is such a nauseating little punk

that anyone would be forgiven for yelling: "Chuck him back

immediately!"

Why, one of the salty dogs on board even remarks: "That's the

orneriest kid I ever seen." Orneriest? "Twenty years I been a

feesherman," the usually sweet-tempered Manuel says about Harvey.

"First time I catch a feesh like you ."

Meanwhile, the crew is happily singing lusty sea chanteys about home,

true love and the lonely business of the fishing industry. What's a

gnarled old fisherman to do when he leaves a good woman for a ship with the

wind in her sails? He pines, plays the squeezebox, and searches for the

meaning of it all.

"A song of true love is as deep as can be/ But never as deep as the

song of the sea." Aye, that's true! Look lively, lads! "Oh

mama, don't you weep for me/ I'm only sailing out to sea

…"

The scurvy dogs aboard this Good Ship Lollipop keep everything nice and

shipshape, as they sing the chanteys and cuss the ornery Harvey, whose

unending tantrums would sink a battleship. They hoist a lot of rigging.

They fish or cut bait. They tie extremely intricate knots–not just a

granny knot, but what looked to my weathered, seafaring eyes like a

three-looped trefoil knot. They rush to and fro, hither and thither, fore

and aft, tying the ropes to cleats, making pretty cat's-cradle

patterns to generic sea music.

They do all this and manfully more in what becomes an intense nautical

teach-in for us all. They would climb the jib, if there was one.

"Stand tall, boys!" goes the captain's gruff command. And

the all-male cast of troupers certainly do.

I was fascinated to learn from the Playbill that the

near-military musical staging is by Jerry Mitchell, who is probably best

known for conceiving and staging eight versions of Broadway Bares ,

an evening of burlesque featuring 130 of Broadway's sexiest dancers,

which "will be reinvented by him for an unlimited run at a major

showroom in Las Vegas next year."

In his rite of passage to becoming a caring responsible young man,

Harvey also learns from Manuel how to carry slops, swab down decks, spit

into dee vind like real fishermen, and generally make himself an anonymous,

beaten team player. "Anyone touch that kid, I tear him apart!"

warns the protective Manuel, who grows more and more attached to Harvey as

the cod begin to bite.

So Captains Courageous blows. There are two thrilling subplots

that shouldn't pass unnoticed. The big one is about a fierce fishing

competition between Manuel and an anti-Harvey sailor who believes the kid

is a jinx. "When the sea wants life," he warns darkly in song,

"the sea takes life." Whoever wins the fishing

competition gets Manuel's beloved squeezebox, which his

fahder left to him, and his fahder left to him.

I won't give away the result. In fact, Manuel unexpectedly loses

the fish-off, in addition to, of course, his squeezebox, because Harvey

cheated on his behalf. But that's just another lesson for bratty

Harvey to learn on his long road to manhood: Never get caught cheating.

The second subplot also involves a competition. This time it's

between old-fashioned and modern shipping technology. Our heroes have a

longstanding rivalry with the crew of a better-equipped fishing boat. They

therefore compete to find out who can catch the most feeshes.

I won't give away this result, either. I'll give a hint.

"Stand tall, boys!" I see you've guessed . Our heroes

win the super-grand fish-off! And who's that helping them? Who's

that tying three-looped trefoil knots with the best of them? Who's

that who makes 'em stand even taller? It's Harvey! The boy

helps them. Et voilà! A sailor is born.

Naturally, there's a storm sequence, leading, I believe, to the

partial collapse of the mizzen-top gallant sail. "Stay law in dee

bawt" ("Stay low in the boat"), Manuel had advised. But in

bravely trying to save the damaged sail, Manuel is tragically swept

overboard to sleep with dee feeshes and his late fahder, who was also a

feesherman.

"I'm all right, leetle feesh," Manuel, he say to the

stricken Harvey in his last drowning words. "I go now and I feesh with

my fahder."

And so, Harvey Ellesworth Cheyne comes to learn that all

the wealth in the world is but a bag of shells compared to an honest plate

of cod.

Captains Courageous isn't the best night out we could have.

Who is it for? I can't, for the life of me, tell you. But let's

say that the music by Frederick Freyer and the book and lyrics by Patrick

Cook were better, and that this minor moral fable of the sea was fresh and

enchanting. For the sake of argument, let's imagine that everything

about Captains Courageous is delightful. Why do I believe, then,

that Lynne Meadow's production at the Manhattan Theater Club still

would not work?

It's in the wrong theater.

The stage is too low. It's remarkably low, and wide. It encourages

the earthbound, not the skyward.

It's the last place–I would have thought–to stage a show

that takes place on a ship. The design solution here is to stage the action

on a wooden platform that revolves dizzyingly. But it's no solution at

all. The ship itself, the sky and ocean, the air we breathe–the very

raison d'être of the entire enterprise–are never

imaginatively evoked. The wooden platform resembles an oversize listing

raft. It is dead to the eye. The Manhattan Theater Club production of

Captains Courageous is unable to soar, supposing it ever could.

For readers who have been on Mars for the past month, here's a recap. Terrence McNally's new play is said (by people who haven't seen it, though various scripts and reports are circulating) to concern a modern-day gay Jesus-like figure who, offstage, has sex with his disciples. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post launched a crusade against this blasphemy, and various talk-radio shows contributed a series of gasps. William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said the play was "sick beyond words." The Manhattan Theater Club, which has been producing Mr. McNally's plays for many years, canceled the play, saying that they had received bomb threats and could not guarantee audience safety. (One message that they recorded singled out "Jew, filthy homosexual Terrence McNally. Because of you, we will exterminate every member of the theater and burn the place to the ground. This is a message from National Security Movement of America.… Death to the Jews worldwide." Mr. McNally, in fact, is Catholic.

When legions of theater people protested, the South African playwright Athol Fugard withdrew his play The Captain's Tiger from the theater's lineup, and several theaters volunteered their venues for the orphaned play, the Manhattan Theater Club did what it should have done in the first place-consulted with the New York Police Department and announced that security would be in place and the show would go on.

It may be the fate of Mr. McNally's play to be prefitted with ideological filters-condemned to be "the gay Jesus play" in the eyes and ears of those who admire it and those who don't alike. But Mr. McNally is lucky, anyway-his play is going to be mounted over a combination of tabloid hysteria and Christian correctness. Many despised works and exhibitions in recent years have not had the same good fortune. As the steady hum of censoriousness has grown to a roar in recent years, magnifying the roar of the protest has been the roar of the cave-in. In 1995, the Smithsonian Institution, after vociferous attack, gutted a planned exhibit on the dropping of the atomic bombs, and went on to postpone even serious consideration of a show on the Vietnam War so that the earliest it could appear is the year 2002, if at all.

And Library of Congress officials dismantled a show about the architecture of slave quarters-a show called Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation , already installed and about to open-because a number of employees, mainly African-Americans, were offended by it. The library went on to remove four anti-lynching cartoons from 1935-1946 from a graphics exhibit. (They were "rather difficult images," Jill Brett, the library's public affairs officer, told me at the time.) The pattern is plain throughout our culture: Since symbols get some people upset, mute them. Instead of inciting debate, run for cover. In this climate, fear roars louder than speech.

Of course, in an anything-goes culture, censorious voices have trouble figuring out how just what to forbid and why. The Post editorialized on May 2 that "in today's artistic climate … [a sexually active gay Jesus] isn't the slightest bit brave or unusual. It is just guaranteed-and clearly intended-to outrage and offend believing Christians." The Post thus took the position that Mr. McNally's offense was simultaneously (a) usual and (b) unusual. With its privileged access into the hearts and minds of fiction writers, the Post evidently bored into the intentions of an artist whose work neither they nor anyone else they knew had seen-because it does not yet exist. In this way, the paper joined the Islamists who don't have to read a page of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses before they rush to condemnation-they knew blasphemy before they saw it.

The uproar over Corpus Christi follows a logic of universal closed-mindedness that is appallingly general these days: If Position X has been ruled out of bounds by somebody, then so must Position Y be by somebody else. To preserve the single standard, cut everyone down to size. Thus did the Catholic League's Mr. Donohue rhetorically challenge intellectuals to say whether they would "rush to defend a play entitled Shylock and Sambo ? Would they defend it knowing that the script calls for gay Jewish slave masters who sodomize their obsequious black slaves?" Oddly, Mr. Donohue's provocation likens the presumably loving sex acts in Mr. McNally's play to acts of rape. More dangerously, he seems to maintain that if one voice deserves being chilled, so do others. If the right eye offends somebody, pluck out the left one, too. One censor fits all.

In other words, the current atmosphere is chilly all around. As Peter Applebome pointed out in The New York Times on June 4, nonprofit theaters are being squeezed by queasy donors. Some theaters want to chill out cultural conservatives, some, cultural radicals. The general principle is the same: No Offense. All hail to the smiley-face theory of culture.

Churches are institutions. Like all other institutions, they maintain precious symbols-icons. Where there are icons, there will be iconoclasts-that is the human condition. One difference between theocracy and democracy is that the latter is duty-bound to protect iconoclasm-and to keep it in bounds so that people don't get hurt along with their icons. Of course speech is often offensive-that is why it needs the government's guarantee, regardless of whom it offends. That is one thing police are for. If you think a play bigoted, the principle of maximum speech permits you to mount your own play, or distribute leaflets denouncing the one you hate, or gather on the sidewalk to argue. If the Catholic League thinks there are too many plays about gays, they should put on their own productions about gay Antichrists-or anyone and anything else they like, or don't like. In the interests of literature, theater producers, too, should abandon political means-tests.

There are no apostles of any faith who cannot learn from their blasphemers. In 1961, Luis Buñuel's great Viridiana , which contained a tableau of Bacchic beggars in the positions of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper , was banned in Spain, along with the rest of Buñuel's films. In 1963, Italy banned it, too, and sentenced Buñuel, in absentia, to a year in prison. It is said that when Generalísimo Francisco Franco finally saw the film, he remarked: "I cannot understand the fuss."

Let everyone take a leaf from the Generalísimo's book. How free is a believer when he is afraid of his own shadow? How comfortable in his spirit when he must go to the mat against blasphemy?