A witty, wealthy and majestically Teutonic Mercedes Ruehl dominates the young and randy set here as Eva Adler, a matriarch who doesn't miss a trick about any candidate who comes courting her daughter, Lili (including spying on some moonlight kissing), and still she manipulates her toward a half-baked marriage.

The literary woods, of course, are full of arrivistes who wed themselves into the cushy life — "An American Tragedy" and "Washington Square," to cite Montgomery Clift's part of the forest (in the films "A Place in the Sun" and "The Heiress") — but Greenberg congests the course of untrue love with the added fillip of having the old flame of the wannabe ardent-swain show up in the second act. Quelle awkward, to say the most!

This late-arriving arriviste subscribes to what he cynically calls "the American plan": marry money, make excellent husbands but maintain a little hedonism on the side. The trick, both men come to discover, lies in actually practicing what they preach. Manhattan Theatre Club produced this — and two previous New York versions of the 1990 play, which must be an in-house record. Joan Copeland had the Ruehl role in both MTC editions (January-February 1990, and again in December 1990, both Off-Broadway) and kept it within supporting-rank boundaries while the star-casting went to the American planners (Tate Donovan and Eric Stoltz in the first version; D.W. Moffett and Jonathan Walker in the second).

Having Ruehl bring star-power-to-spare to a plainly supporting part gives the production a decided dazzle. "Well, Eva's important to the play," the actress reasoned, at the after-party at the Hard Rock Cafι. "She's a powerful creature, a little bit like [The Seagull's] Arkadina."

View the Entire Photo Gallery David Grindley Photo by Aubrey Reuben

Then there are the laughs she mines from the accent, her facial tics and timing coming from untangling the thick Germanic coating she has given Greenberg's throwaways. "The German accent, it can be funny," she said. This particular one comes from two sources: "There was a nurse in a doctor's office in New York, whose name was Rrrrosemairrrre, and she was from Germany, and she would say, 'Mercedes, it is time for us to take your blood. Now, sit down in that chair and be quiet.' She was one, and the other one was Irene Worth in Lost in Yonkers, who played my German mother. I sometimes feel like I am channeling Irene in this." [That Neil Simon Pulitzer Prize-winner won Tony Awards for both actresses.]

"I'm having a rollicking good time with this. Know what's fun? I'm the older actress in the group — the senior member — so I get to be relaxed and tell 'em, 'It's just a play' and that we're going to keep learning and growing and figuring out what this play is about — beyond critics, beyond opening. The fun has just begun. I think I'm serving a good purpose. They're all so young, and they get so nervous about these things."

David Grindley, the British director making his third Broadway showing in as many years, enjoys having a star like Ruehl shining out of a supporting role. "I don't think the play is being upended by what's she's doing," he said. "I think what she's doing is demanding that the others come up to scratch — and that's exactly what they do. It always struck me as a woman's play. It feels very much to be about the women.

"I think the writing's very good. It's got great wit. It plays to my mιtier, which has a large degree of humor in it that allows the audience into the show. As an audience, you get into the room and then lock the door, and it takes you to an emotional place that perhaps you don't expect. I think it's very effective that way. It becomes a much more arresting and emotionally affecting evening than you were first expecting."

In the lead role of Nick Lockridge (even the name smacks, accurately, of something not to be believed), Grindley cast a pet: Kieran Campion. "Kieran is my longest-serving member of The Grindley Repertory Company," he joked. "He has done everything I've done in New York. He was the captured German in Journey's End and Freddie in Pygmalion and, now, Nick in The American Plan. He's just a great actor. He's very responsive, and he deserves a break. He's a fantastic leading man who hasn't had the opportunity he deserves, and I hope they give him an opportunity."

In between Grindley gigs, Campion cracked, "I don't work." He's quite grateful to get this shot. "Nick Lockridge is an incredibly well-drawn character with a tremendous journey, going from somebody who looks like nothing has ever happened to him to a shell of his former self at the end of the play. How he gets there is really exciting."

Lily Rabe is a snug fit for Lili Adler, excelling in everything from jump-rope (brava, brava!) to a heavy-duty final scene where she heartbreakingly reveals the collateral damage of fortune-hunting. Mostly, she spends her time struggling to get out of her mother's shadow, clutching at straws to achieve that end.

"She's desperate to get out of her circumstances," explained Rabe, "desperate to become an independent woman and to break away from her mother. I think she's really trying to find her way in the world and to try to be able to be her own person. She has been very stunted in her childhood, very kept and isolated by her mother."

And, as if more vulnerability was required, Rabe is mostly barefoot. "The designer said, 'I've been thinking. I really want you barefoot.' I said 'Okay.' I love that. I did another play — Crimes of the Heart — where I was practically barefoot throughout."

Also under a heading of Been There-Done That is Austin Lysy in "the other man" role, Gil Harbison. He turns out to be, regardless of gender, quite a good kisser. "It's not the first time I've had to kiss a man on stage," he admitted. "I'm used to it."

Clearly, he enjoys his character's cauldron-stirring. "He's fun, kinda like a trickster, actually. He's not as neurotic as Nick about having to live in two different worlds at once. He gets to come in in Act II and mix everything up for everybody — that's always fun. I think of him as a trickster with a real heart. He really loves this guy, and he's trying to figure out a way to be homosexual at a time when it wasn't at all accepted, and I think he has a really good plan. It's too bad that it doesn't work out." Continued...