Broadway, Straight Up

When Esme, the celebrated stage actress at the center of David Hare's play Amy's View, agrees to appear on her son-in-law Dominic's TV talk show, the topic he wants to discuss is whether theater is dead. There's no doubt where Dominic stands. Theater is so old fashioned, he complains, so slow moving: "Why don't we admit it? It's been superseded. It had its moment, but its moment is gone."

Ouch. When even plays start to talk about whether plays are irrelevant, you know this is an art form in trouble. Yet the irony is that these lines are spoken in a play that is drawing near sellout crowds on Broadway and at the end of a season in which serious dramas have made a remarkable comeback. The new shows this season with the toughest tickets aren't the big splashy musicals (most of them were big splashy busts) but straight plays--especially revivals of two old-fashioned, slow-moving classics, Death of a Salesman and The Iceman Cometh.

The success of these two giant tragedies is notable, for they stand in marked contrast to most of the pygmy-size works around them. New plays these days tend to be small, tidy things, dramas that tend their own little garden and don't venture very far into the wild outdoors. Hare's The Blue Room, which brought Nicole Kidman to Broadway earlier this season, reduced Schnitzler's La Ronde to a trivial actors' exercise for two. Hare then went one better (or one lesser) by appearing onstage alone, recounting his trip to the Middle East and calling it a play, Via Dolorosa. Another well-received import from Britain, The Weir, is a 90-minute chamber piece in which the denizens of a bar in Ireland trade ghost stories. This year's Pulitzer Prize for drama went to Wit, an affecting play about a woman dying of cancer, but essentially an expanded monologue.

Big plays--works with imaginative ambition, a social context, plots--still exist, however, and two have arrived to end Broadway's season with a flourish. Amy's View has been dismissed, somewhat patronizingly, as a vehicle for Judi Dench, fresh from her Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. As Esme, the self-centered actress whose relationship with her daughter (Samantha Bond) deteriorates over the years, Dench is indeed a marvel, as impressive for what she doesn't do as what she does. This is no scenery-chewing cartoon of a theatrical grand dame but a tightly controlled and utterly convincing portrait of a woman whose performance doesn't end when the house lights go up.

But Amy's View has more to offer. Along with a nuanced picture of the anguish a mother and daughter can cause each other without even trying, the play develops several contrapuntal themes: the rise of Dominic (Tate Donovan) from striving young critic to media superstar; Esme's descent into financial ruin; her mother-in-law's slide into senility. All of which is arrayed on a Shavian battlefield in which strong and articulate people grapple with ideas about art and life.

Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West is more deceptive. It has the trappings of a small play--four characters, one bleakly confining set--but is really a very big one. In the third of his trilogy set in the rural Irish county of Galway (the first, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, was a Broadway success last year; the second, A Skull in Connemara, has yet to be produced in the U.S.), McDonagh again shows a knack for casually mixing the blackest comedy with haunting human tragedy. Two brothers (Brian F. O'Byrne and Maeliosa Stafford) are visited on the day of their father's funeral by the local priest (David Ganly). It turns out that Dad was killed by one of the brothers (accidentally, he claims); that the siblings fight viciously at the most trivial of provocations; and that the priest is near despair at a community in which cruelty and murder seem part of the landscape.

The Lonesome West has plenty of grisly laughs, but this is at bottom a terrifying, brilliant play. McDonagh's mad brothers wrestle on the ground like six-year-olds but have the conscience-free menace of characters in a Tarantino film. The brother-vs.-brother conflict is reminiscent of Sam Shepard, but McDonagh's writing has more discipline, and more sadness. It's a splash of cold water on the romance of rural Ireland and a shocking vision of human nature turned rancid by boredom and isolation. In director Garry Hynes' nearly flawless production, The Lonesome West shows that the theater's moment may still have a few moments left.