Theater: Double, Trouble and Bubble

That perennial invalid, Broadway, is faring better this season but hardly thriving. The theater year started more than nine months ago, with the cutoff for last spring's Tony Awards. It has produced only two new American plays that are still running. Add two London imports and three revivals--one of which, Blood Knot, closes this week--and there you have it: the total of non- musical survivors on the Great Gray Way. Why, then, does New York City seem abuzz with theatrical vitality? In large part because Off Broadway is providing a satisfying mix of star turns, ensemble work, deft new writing and apt revivals. Operating in smaller spaces, under less daunting financial pressures, off-Broadway's mostly nonprofit companies have mounted half a dozen recent shows demonstrating artistry and elan.

The best new play of the crop is Rum and Coke, a wry, poignant look back at the can-do optimism and patriotic naivete that led the U.S. to stumble into the Bay of Pigs invasion. Playwright Keith Reddin, 29, was a child of four when CIA-backed Cuban insurgents made their disastrous landing in 1961, but he captures with compassion and accuracy the Kennedy Administration's fundamental miscalculation: the belief in a nonexistent Cuban underground that was only waiting for a signal of support to rise up and overthrow Fidel Castro. Reddin presents the Bay of Pigs fiasco as a dress rehearsal by America's best and brightest for their misjudgments in Viet Nam. Some of the funniest scenes depict the white-collar macho of bureaucrats who react to caution as a sign of deficient manhood. Reddin's cutting strokes are more often subtle, as in brief, oddly sympathetic glimpses of Castro and Richard Nixon. The central character is an eager, puppyish former Yalie tapped to train the invaders in communications. Peter MacNicol--best known as the neophyte writer Stingo in the film Sophie's Choice--is brilliant in the part, shifting from gawky innocence to sadder but wiser recollection and infusing it all with the self- intoxicating energy of the New Frontier. He is ably assisted by Polly Draper as a needling older sister and especially by Tony Plana as the most soulful and ultimately most disillusioned of the Cubans.

Reddin is bringing off a rare double: while his words resound in Rum and Coke, he is onstage 20 blocks away in a manic revival of the 1930s farce Room Service, a portrait of pre-Broadway opening desperation. Reddin winningly playswhat else?--the playwright, a geeky kid from Oswego who eventually has to "die" for an hour and a half so that his show might live. Director Alan Arkin seems too conscious that Room Service was adapted as a Marx Brothers movie vehicle. Mark Hamill, the fresh-faced Luke Skywalker of the Star Wars series, is mustached and growly as an imitation Groucho; Lonny Price giggles and cavorts as a talking Harpo; Andrew Bloch is less derivative, but he is not distinctively anything else either. These performances have charm, but they bring to mind the inimitable pleasures of the originals.