His Play's The Thing

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Love's Fire does something quite the opposite: it converts the universal sentiments of Shakespeare's love poetry into mundane modern anecdotes. The sonnet that ends "Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds" is the pretext for a familiar Wendy Wasserstein cartoon of bitchy guests at a snooty Manhattan dinner party. "So are you to my thoughts as food to life," prompts Tony Kushner to concoct a labored sitcom about a gay man infatuated with his lesbian shrink.

The evening is redeemed by the final playlet, from John Guare, who dives headfirst into the why-Shakespeare question and comes out, refreshed, on the other side. A group of college students is wrestling, footnote by footnote, with two sonnets. Seeking to justify the enterprise, they sprint through a fanciful history of the world, from Adam and Eve on. Their conclusion: works of art like the sonnets are mankind's feeble attempt to recapture paradise, "a hazy reminder of what we had in that garden when the Tree of Knowledge still grew alongside forests of mercy." A little poetry, a little fantasy, a frisson of universal truth--Shakespeare would have liked that.