Mac Wellman's Crowbar is a blunter work than Some Americans Abroad and its social ideas are cruder, but it deserves some marks for ambition, if not for originality. Crowbar is not only being performed at the Victory Theatre-a newly renovated house on 42nd Street. It is, in effect, a history of that theater, first called the Republic when owned by Oscar Hammerstein, then named for David Belasco after he refurbished it for his spectacular productions (starting with Sag Harbor in 1900), then renamed the Republic when it featured movies, burlesque, and porno films, and finally called the Victory, having reverted to its former legitimate glory. Besides being a history of the theater, Crowbar serves as something of a theater tour, minutely examining, with floodlights and flashlights, every corner of the ancient stage and auditorium, especially the gorgeous, cupid-decorated overhead dome. The audience is seated both on stage and to the side, with most of the action in the orchestra and balconies, affording a clear view of the actors-and of a critic for the dailies snoozing in his chair.

Billed as a "pataphysical compilation"-a reference to Alfred Jarry's School of Pataphysics-culled from newspaper stories around the turn of the century (the date of Sag Harbor's opening), Crowbar is intended as a ghost story, its dust-covered spirits being the various suicides, homicides, infanticides, and lunatics of the time. A mostly female chorus stomps through the house like a spectral chain gang, a limber figure with saxophone (Reg E. Cathey) provides the exposition, a Polish woman (Elzbieta Czyzewska) wails about the changes in management over the past ninety years and the plight of her poor benighted country (which "doesn't exist most of the time"). Her bewildered husband (Omar Shapli) tells us that "America is an empty theater and all the theaters are haunted," and finally David Belasco (Yusef Bulos) materializes to extol his ingenious technical improvements and to regret "the infamy of consuming time."

Although well executed, the production spinoffs of Marat/Sade and Phantom of the Opera tire one rather quickly, and so does the inflated style of the playwright's dialogue. (One is tempted to ask, along with one of his characters, for "a little reduction of the garrulity.") Because they are content to substitute rhetorical tirades for dramatic speech, Wellman's historical ghosts never manage to escape their tabloid origins. And the wider theme seems to have a tabloid imprint, too. I'm not certain how much more I know about my country after being told it's an empty, haunted theater. I'm not even sure how much more I know about the theater after hearing it described as "a kind of big place-with red walls-like the inside of a human heart-but not as em t ." But then I have never been numbered among those who grow weak-kneed and wet-eyed about endangered Broadway houses. I did not join the chorus of outrage when the Morosco and the Belasco were being threatened. And while I am delighted whenever such legitimate theaters as the Victory in Times Square and the Majestic in Brooklyn are rescued from urban decay and porno nude shows, I confess to being much more interested in what goes on inside these buildings than in the ghosts and ornaments of their past.

What's going on inside the Victory at the moment is a riot of environmental techniques, performed with all the enthusiasm, and some of the limitations, of an advanced drama-school exercise. This En Garde Arts production seems imitatively avant-garde. Wellman possesses, at times, a certain daffy Joycean eloquence that augurs well for future better-formed plays, and Richard Caliban's direction shows control of mood, effects, and movement. But in view of all that's happening in the world these days-during a time when at least one playwright has things on his mind urgent enough to dominate the affairs of an entire country-Crowbar seems peculiarly theater-enclosed. For all its technical ambitiousness, it's another melancholy sign of how little American art seems to matter in the universe at large.

Review Grade: B