Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about LOMBARDI, LA BÊTE, RAIN, SWAN LAKE, WINGS, THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE, POWER BALLADZ, BANISHED CHILDREN OF EVE, IN TRANSIT, DRAMATIS PERSONAE,, OFFICE HOURS AND WISH I HAD A SYLVIA PLATH.

Plays about sports are a real rarity. It has been my perception over the years that the only thing that theatre people care less about than sports is religion. Plays which take religion seriously are even more of a rarity than plays about sports. I could go on and on about why this is, and why it’s a shame; but suffice it to say that we actually have a play about sports running on Broadway right now, Eric Simonson’s fascinating Lombardi at Circle in the Square.

Lombardi takes place in 1965, as the Green Bay Packers prepare for the upcoming season. A young reporter for Look Magazine has been assigned to write a profile of their legendary coach, Vince Lombardi. Over the course of a week, the reporter gets to know Lombardi, his wife Marie, and several players, as he tries to get to the heart of what makes Lombardi, and his team, so successful. Although the play which emerges does make you understand this great sports figure, it is not a hagiographic portrait. Though it is often quite inspirational, what we get is Lombardi, warts and all.

Thomas Kail has done a brilliant job of directing, and his cast is first rate. Dan Lauria is sensational in the title role. You almost feel he’s channeling Coach Lombardi. But he is matched by the delicate performance of Judith Light as Marie Lombardi, who provides much of the humor and much of the insight into what made this great sports figure successful.

Although Lombardi is primarily for football fans, it can also be enjoyed by those of you who don’t know a touchdown from a home run. I loved it, and I highly recommend it.

I also recommend the revival of David Hirson’s La Bête, an import from London at the Music Box Theatre. When this play was first staged on Broadway almost 20 years ago, it was one of the most notorious flops of the Rich Years. Many people who saw it thought it was absolutely brilliant (myself included); but a pan from the NY Times’ Frank Rich caused it to die the death. As I recall, Rich thought the play was merely an exercise in cleverness for cleverness’ sake. Well, I’ll give him this: the writing certainly is clever.

Can you imagine, a play set in France in the 17th Century, written completely in rhymed couplets, sending up the theatre and the culture of Molière’s era, yet somehow managing to reflect our own?

A famous playwright named Elomire (an anagram of “Molière”) survives with his company on the patronage of a princess (in the original version, the patron was male) who wants to force on him another playwright and actor who she thinks is a genius, a pompous, self-congratulating bore named Valere. When we first meet this jackass, he wanders into a room occupied by Elomire and one of his actors and proceeds to hijack their conversation with a monologue that lasts at least a half hour. The reactions of David Hyde Pierce and Stephen Ouimette are priceless as they try to get a word in edgewise, to no avail, and this monologue as delivered by the great British actor Mark Rylance is one of the most incredible feats of acting I have ever witnessed.

The play tends to sag in the second act, when Princess Conti makes her appearance; but overall this is a brilliantly theatrical evening in the theatre, superbly directed by Matthew Warchus. I found La Bête great fun, and heartily recommend it.

Rain, at the Neil Simon Theatre, is also a lot of fun – if you’re a Beatles fan but not too much of a purist to enjoy a simulation of the Beatles in concert. The musicians who portray the Fab Four during various stages of their magical mystery tour are simply put, amazing. They sound exactly like the four lads from Liverpool. It’s a trip down memory lane. For those of you who would like to take such a trip and relive those golden days of musical yesteryear, go over to the Neil Simon Theatre and get back to where you once belonged.

Another great British director, Matthew Bourne, has brought his famous production of Swan Lake to City Center. The first time around, Bourne’s completely original take on the Swan Lake scenario was highly controversial, what with the swans all danced by men and what with his conception of this animal in general as a predatory thug of a bird. Here, the gaggle of swans reminded me of the gangs in West Side Story, or of Malcolm McDowell and the boys in A Clockwork Orange. This version of Swan Lake is not as controversial as it once was, but it’s just as brilliant. It’s a don’t-miss.

Second Stage has revived Arthur Kopit’s Wings, starring Jan Maxwell as Emily Stilson, a former wing-walker who has a stroke and then who struggles to recover, and directed by John Doyle.

The problem with this play is that most of it is an interior monologue spoken by Mrs. Stilson as she struggles to fight back against the debilitating effects of her “accident.” In other words, it’s rather static. The problem with this production is that the aviation metaphor doesn’t work if the play is set in the present. The heyday of stunt flying and wing walking was the 1920s and 1930s. Thirty years ago, when the play was first done on Broadway with a stunning performance by British actress Constance Cummings, Mrs. Stilson could have been a stunt aviatrix in her 60s or 70s. In other words, in order for the play to make sense it has to take place 30 years ago, and Emily Stilson has to be an old lady. In this production, Jan Maxwell looks mid-50s. She would have been walking on the wings of a Curtis Jenny in about 1980. I don’t think so! Ms. Maxwell has shown she is a gifted comic actress in previous roles, but she just doesn’t have the vocal range to play this demanding role.

I would say you could skip this production and not feel you’ve missed anything.

Julia Cho’s The Language Archive, produced by the Roundabout at their Laura Pels Theatre Off Broadway, is a wonderful comedy about a philologist obsessed with dying languages, yet who at the same time has no clue as to how to communicate with the women in his life.

Mark Brokaw’s production is witty and a lot of fun, and his cast is uniformly first rate.

This one’s a don’t-miss.

Irish Rep has another winner in Ciarán O’Reilly’s brilliant production of Kelly Younger’s Banished Children of Eve, a dramatization of the novel by Peter Quinn about the Civil War draft riots in New York. The central characters are impoverished actors, but the songwriter Stephen Foster, equally impoverished and drinking himself to death, is also part of the mix, my one quibble with the play, as he’s not integrated very well into the plot.

I don’t usually write about the set design, but I have to say that Charlie Corcoran’s whirling modular set is the best use of Irish Rep’s rather awkward space I have ever seen.

The whole thing has a very Gangs of New York feel to it. I don’t mean that as a criticism though. This is a wonderful evening in the theatre and should go straight to the top of your must-see list.

I’m finally getting around to shows that have closed, unfortunately.

Power Balladz, at the Midtown Theatre, was  a tribute to the 1980’s power ballad. It was  more of a revue than a musical. But it was extremely well-performed. If going back to the 1960s to see Rain is going back to far for you, if your musical era is the 1980’s, then this is the show would have been for you. It helps if you already know the songs, as most of the lyrics were unintelligible. I enjoyed it, though, even though I was not very familiar with the music.

In Transit, at Primary Stages was a series of vignettes about various New Yorkers coming and going. The songs were all sung a capella. I’m afraid this one didn’t make much of an impression on me, largely because I thought the music rather dull. If you missed this one don’t fret – you didn’t miss much.

Dramatis Personae, by Gonzalo Rodriguez Risco, at the Cherry Lane Studio, was about three writers, apparently all Americans. We are in some unspecified foreign country. What the Americans are doing there is never explained. There’s a hostage situation going on across the street. Had the three writers been hostages, this play might have been a lot more dramatically interesting; but as it was, it was not bad and featured excellent performances.

A. R. Gurney’s Office Hours, at the Flea, was about college professors who teach a Great Books of the Western Canon course at an unspecified university. They are under pressure from students, parents and administrators, who don’t see the usefulness, the “relevance,” of studying Dead White Males like Plato, Dante and Shakespeare. Gurney’s play was a delight, though I wasn’t wild about Jim Simpson’s direction which, I felt, lacked pace.

Finally, Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath, written and performed by Elizabeth Gray, at 59 E 59, was a one women play more or less about You Know Who — poet, suicide and icon of feminism. Ms. Gray was mighty fine; but this was definitely a show for women who like to celebrate Plath’s victimization, who believe that men are The Enemy. If you’re a guy who has had to, perhaps more than once, deal with a crazy woman in your life, it would have been a tough sit.

LOMBARDI. Circle in the Square, 235 W. 50th St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

LA BÊTE. Music Box Theatre, 239 W. 45th St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

RAIN. Neil Simon Theatre, 250 W. 52nd St.

TICKETS: www.ticketmaster.com or 212-307-4100

SWAN LAKE. City Center, 131 W. 55th St.

TICKETS: www.nyccitycenter.org or 212-581-1212

WINGS. Second Stage, 305 W. 43rd St.

TICKETS: 212-246-4422

THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE. Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46th St.

TICKETS: 212-719-1300

BANISHED CHILDREN OF EVE. Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 W. 22nd St.

TICKETS: 212-727-2737

ALAS, CLOSED:

IN TRANSIT

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

OFFICE HOURS

WISH I HAD A SYLVIA PLATH

POWER BALLADZ

“Who is this guy?”

For over thirty years Lawrence Harbison was in charge of new play acquisition for Samuel French, Inc., during which time his work on behalf of playwrights resulted in the first publication of such subsequent luminaries as Jane Martin, Don Nigro, Tina Howe, Theresa Rebeck, José Rivera, William Mastrosimone, Charles Fuller, and Ken Ludwig, among many others; and the acquisition of musicals such as Smoke of the Mountain, A…My Name Is Alice, Little Shop of Horrors and Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down. He is a now a free-lance editor, primarily for Smith and Kraus, Inc., for whom he edits annual anthologies of best plays by new playwrights and women playwrights, best ten-minute plays and best monologues and scenes for men and for women. For many years he wrote a weekly column on his adventures in the theater for two Manhattan Newspapers, the Chelsea Clinton News and The Westsider. His new column, “On the Aisle with Larry,” is a weekly feature at www.smithandkraus.com.

He works with individual playwrights to help them develop their plays (see his website, www.playfixer.com). He has also served as literary manager or literary consultant for several theatres, such as Urban Stages and American Jewish Theatre. He is a member of both the Outer Critics Circle and the Drama Desk. He has served many times over the years as a judge and commentator for various national play contests and lectures regularly at colleges and universities. He holds a B.A. from Kenyon College and an M.A. from the University of Michigan.

He is currently working on a book, Masters of the Contemporary American Drama.

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will