Stage:

...At times the piece gets a little foolish...

...These do no real harm to the show which, whatever serious implications it has, is primarily an amusing game-"a theatrical fruit-basket turn-over," as Wellman called it in a program note...

...A woman sitting in a box-a dead actress apparently-has a slippery speech about time, death, sex, what have you which, as Elzbieta Czyzewska gave it, was oddly funny, strangely sensible...

...Since she did not become a journalist until 1913, he is probably talking about the 44th Street Belasco...

...It is a gem of a speech...

...she indicates what she does not want to see in the rest of Herne's play, then in any play, then in theater for the ninety years since Herne's first-act curtain came down...

...The Victory Theatre on 42nd Street was the setting and the subject of Crowbar...

...Even so, it will be gone by the time you read this...

...Now that the crowbar has fallen, don't look for its ghost...

...That is the trouble with site-specific productions, pieces for occasion...

...It does explain the title for playgoers who like to know what titles mean...

...Wellman, who combed turn-of-the-century newspapers for deaths, has peopled-or rather ghosted-his piece with the victims of violence-murders, suicides, accidents that took place on or near the opening date of the Republic in 1900...

...Rioso appears, several times too often, in a remote corner of the theater as though surprise provides substance to the fairly obvious message he has to deliver...

...This history, told in slides and direct explanations, is part of what Crowbar is about, but this is not a simple celebration of a theater...

...Although the ghosts of Belasco and Hammerstein are on hand, for the most part these are not conventional theatrical ghosts-the great performers of the past...

...The audience is grouped on the stage and at the front of the auditorium (stage right), while in the rest of the theater-the boxes, the aisles, the balconies-figures appear to assert that old show-business platitude-that all theaters are haunted...

...Although it has its fascinations on the page, the presumably accidental confluence of five strangers needs the Bow Bridge setting for which it was written...

...not that that matters since the theater he is creating is visible only in his words...

...Beyond the site, the best things are the long monologues provided by Wellman, a virtuoso mixer of wit, eloquence, and incoherence...

...GERALD WEALESERALD WEALES...

...Crowbar was popular-probably to the surprise of everyone involved-and it was extended for two weeks beyond its original limited run...

...The main performers play multiple roles or, more often, single figures whose identities keep shifting, changing from one victim to another...

...This dramatic final moment grows out of nothing in the play-no line of narrative, at least-and gets whatever force it has from the theatrical gesture itself...

...Be on the lookout for something new from En Garde Arts...

...David Belasco took over the theater in 1902, fancily renovated it, and renamed it after himself...

...It opened as the Republic in 1900 when Oscar Hammerstein presented Sag Harbor, James A. Herne's last play...

...A chorus of ghosts, wearing costumes that suggest the Greek games at Bryn Mawr, tiptoes around the theater singing about "empty air" in a tune that kept suggesting the domestics' trippety-trip salute to Professor Higgins' My Fair Lady...

...Best of all, was Nora Dunfee's first-nighter (the action ostensibly takes place during an intermission of the opening play), who begins by talking about Sag Harbor, speculating on what will happen when the play recommences...

...STAGE PRYING OPEN THE PAST WELLMAN'S 'CROWBAR' Mac Wellman's Crowbar is the first production I have seen of En Garde Arts, which was founded in 1985 to produce site-specific pieces, often performed outside where passers-by can become part of the audience...

...There is also an implied connection between disasters inside and outside the theater, between theatrical role-playing and unan-chored identities...

...Rioso is a saxophone-playing guide, somewhat menacing in manner, who tries to introduce a blustering, solid-citizen character-under various names, having suffered various deaths-into the mysteries of theater...

...Belasco has a lovingly detailed description of his theater, based on a real interview with . Djuna Barnes...

...It declined to porn flicks and finally to abandonment...

...The chief charm of the piece is the setting, the theater itself, a demirep of a building, plainly down-at-heels but with touches of past elegance still in place...

...His assurance is shattered at the end, when the ghost of William Gorman (played by David Van Tieghem, who did the music for the piece) slams a crowbar down on stage, unmasking Rioso as a laborer who was killed during the Belasco renovations when a falling crowbar-dropped by Gorman-smashed his skull...

...The Victory was a derelict theater with a grand history when En Garde Arts moved in on it...

...When he moved on to 44th Street to the new Belasco Theatre, the Republic reclaimed its name and ran, first as a legitimate, then as a burlesque house until the early 1940s when, now the Victory, it became a movie theater...

...I did see the script of Bad Penny, one of the three Plays in the Park that En Garde Arts offered in Central Park last year...

...They cannot be reviewed or, if they are, they become something else in the process...

...they are promising Little West 12th Street in June, a scripted tour of New York's meat-packing district...

...This melange of half-told stories, carefully orchestrated confusions, presumably is allied to the changing nature of the theater, always itself under various guises...