Unmade in America In the current feast of classics, even losers are entertaining

NEW YORK THEATER NEW YORK - New American drama has been scarcer than parking places in New York this season. Revivals of American classics are another story. Three recently opened

Monday, April 3rd 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

NEW YORK THEATER

NEW YORK - New American drama has been scarcer than parking places in New York this season. Revivals of American classics are another story.

Three recently opened shows offer theatergoers the luxury of comparing an old-fashioned well-made drama with the hipper stuff that has largely supplanted it. Arthur Laurents' The Time of the Cuckoo still looks amazingly sturdy for a conventional play that premiered in 1952. David Mamet's American Buffalo and Sam Shepard's True West, both frequently cited as among their playwright's best pieces, are more oblique, but perhaps all the more interesting for that.

Along with the sterling current Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, these productions constitute a feast of great and near-great American plays. All three focus on outsiders who want to break into something bigger than their narrow little lives but wind up losers all the same.

The Time of the Cuckoo has had many lives - a vehicle for Broadway doyenne Shirley Booth, a movie for Katharine Hepburn (Summertime) and a musical by Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim (Do I Hear a Waltz?). Though Mr. Laurents is now remembered as the librettist for West Side Story, in his day he was one of the American theater's leading lights - not only a playwright of note, but a distinguished director and screenwriter.

In The Time of the Cuckoo, he occupies a niche between Henry James and Tennessee Williams: An American spinster, Leona Samish, tours Europe in the hope of romance but finds herself unable to cope with the continent's superior sexual sophistication.

The situation was getting somewhat stale even a half-century ago. Mr. Laurents, however, freshened it up with a sexual frankness that must have seemed bold at the time. Nicholas Martin's knowing Lincoln Center cast, led by Debra Monk as Leona, makes even the tendentious debates about marital morality come alive.

In its ability to hold an audience, The Time of the Cuckoo holds up well against the two more-contemporary classics. Mr. Mamet and Mr. Shepard deliberately leave gaps that an onlooker must fill in for himself - if he's lucky, with the help of a terrific actor or two.

Atlantic Theater Company and its director, Neil Pape, have been closely identified with Mr. Mamet. They are devoting this season to a retrospective of his work. Their American Buffalo was first presented at London's Donmar Warehouse, the home base of director Sam Mendes, who won an Oscar this week for American Beauty, before coming to New York.

A transfer to Broadway was tentatively planned, but some lukewarm New York reviews killed the chance.

Another Oscar winner, William H. Macy, plays Teach. He too has a long association with Mr. Mamet and even with this play - he portrayed the youngest of its three roles, Bobby, in the original production.

Mr. Macy's take on Teach is unusual.

In American Buffalo, three men sit around in a junk shop planning to heist a coin collection. Teach, the most volatile, simmers with suspicion and anxiety and erupts at key moments. Mr. Macy's Teach seems more thoughtful than most. (In fact, many actors in the role seem hardly to think at all. They're just bombs ready to go off.) Mr. Macy's approach alienates some observers, but it certainly fits the text.

Mr. Macy's co-stars offer more conventional performances.

Philip Baker Hall exudes animal wariness as the junk store owner, Donny. Best of all is 19-year-old Mark Webber as the ambiguously innocent Bobby. Mr. Webber fuses the highly abstracted Mamet dialogue with the sense of an actual human being. (The playwright is on record as opposing making his characters too "real," but that's his tough luck.)

A step up from the current version of American Buffalo is the sensational new production of True West.

Director Matthew Warchus earned his American reputation by makingmasculine aggression funny and entertaining in Art.

Mr. Shepard's male animals are of a far more dangerous sort. Thank goodness, Mr. Warchus and his cast capture the playwright's out-of-kilter wit with such pungency that an audience gets it immediately. He doesn't stint on the play's violence, either.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternate as the brothers isolated in their mother's empty house. Austin, the literate and conventional one, is trying to finish a screenplay. Lee, the outlaw brother, is broke, sizing up the neighbors' houses so he can burglarize them.

In the performance I saw, Mr. Hoffman nailed Austin's effete hypocrisy with a perfect ear for the insincere inflection.

Mr. Reilly's Lee oozed boozy malice. When the tables began to turn, you could see how each actor might find otherwise unsuspected reserves to play the opposite role.

The supposedly avant-garde and fearsome Mr. Shepard is the funniest playwright on Broadway at the moment. The audience roars, whether it's Mr. Hoffman's Austin drawling an innocuous putdown or dousing himself with beer in newfound abandon or Mr. Reilly's Lee trying vainly to type or crushing pieces of toast into the floor with his boot.

In fact, all three shows make losing entertaining but at the same time a little scary.

PERFORMANCE INFORMATION
The Time of the Cuckoo is playing at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, 150 W. 65th St., through May 7. American Buffalo is playing at the Atlantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St., through May 21. True West is playing at Circle in the Square, 1633 Broadway. Call Telecharge for all three, 1-800-432-7250.