Les Formidables

At the end of Charles Busch's campy 1985 hit Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, the two ageless, eponymous hags decide to take their act on the road. Tahoe, Chicago, Boston and then the glittering climax -- Broadway! Well, dears, that's one faded dream. The Great White Way still welcomes the big musicals, those theme parks with song cues, and a few dramas (usually developed elsewhere, often with subsidies). But it is now only one stop -- perhaps the biggest, and at $75 a top ticket surely the priciest -- on the world tour of hits. For original work, for vitality and glamour, more than ever, off- Broadway is the place to be.

The smaller theaters in New York City have long been home to droll souls like Busch, as well as to camp cabaret like the French import Les Incroyables (70 endless minutes of cross-dressing, lip-synching and canned cancan) and innocent party-time musicals like Nunsense 2: The Sequel (this time the good sisters of Mount Saint Helen's School play "Pin the Braid on Sinead").

Now off-Broadway is also attracting top stars and prestige playwrights. This month Vanessa Redgrave opens in Vita and Virginia and the Joseph Papp Public Theater premieres Sam Shepard's Simpatico. In December the Public has a new Hal Prince musical, The Petrified Prince. January brings a trio of one-acters by Woody Allen, David Mamet and Elaine May. Neil Simon, a Broadway pillar for a third of a century, made news recently when he said that mainstem plays had become too expensive to produce. Now even he is off-Broadway bound.

But why wait for these luminaries? Right now Manhattan playgoers will find this year's Pulitzer drama winner (Edward Albee's Three Tall Women) and a likely candidate for next year's prize (Terrence McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion!). Walk down 42nd Street to find the wittiest evening in town (David Ives' All in the Timing). And if you wonder what Kenneth Branagh does when he's not doing everything else, check out the U.S. premiere of his 1987 play Public Enemy.

Household names on the marquee do not, of course, guarantee dramatic splendor inside. The Branagh play is a trifle that searches for nightmare poetry in "plain old American-Irish English" and for political significance in the story of a Belfast punk (Paul Ronan) obsessed by the grit and grace of Jimmy Cagney. It finds none of the above, lost as it is in a muddle of moralizing and attitudinizing. But it shares a potent theme with the season's cannier off-Broadway ventures: that star worship is a virus, carried by the popular media and infecting anyone who has a little talent and big gaudy dreams. The difference is that, in many other shows, the Warner Bros. star whom the hero might dream of being is not Cagney but Bette Davis, patron saint of bitchery, proto-queen of camp.

Off-Broadway has long been the Gay White Way. When Broadway, in the postwar era of Tennessee Williams, William Inge and Edward Albee, addressed homosexual themes, it did so in the metaphorical closet. The modern gay writer can address his dreams and demons directly; and in the aids plague, he has a suitable subject for domestic tragedy. Today the gay sensibility -- acerb, lusty, nostalgic, poignant -- dominates high drama and low comedy.