"The American Alan Ayckbourn" and "The British Neil Simon," as they are often referred to in their respective countries, seem to have been squared off for some sort of laugh-off showdown via revivals of what many consider their most successful comedies. I'm telling ya, it's a little like "High Noon" at eight o'clock!

Both plays find their merriment in mismatches. Simon takes the tack of two poker cronies batcheloring it a while after their marriages crash and burn, but Ayckbourn views the marital wreckage as works in progress—three couples in three kitchens over the course of three Christmases and three acts. First up: a wanna-be real-estate developer (Alan Ruck), whose fortunes reverse wildly between acts, and his little Mrs. Good Housekeeping (Clea Lewis), who develops a fondness of her own cleaning fumes. Next: a failed architect (Sam Robards) who fancies himself "a sexual Flying Dutchman" and reduces his cheated-on wife (Mireille Enos) to frantically failed suicide attempts. And finally: a fuddy-duddy banker (Paxton Whitehead) and his drunken trophy wife (Deborah Rush).

This is Manhattan Theatre Club's seventh fling with the densely prolific Ayckbourn, and MTC Artistic Director Lynne Meadow toasted him—in absentia—at the after-party held across the street at The Supper Club. "He was back in New York just last week," she said, "seeing the show and meeting the company and Joey [director John Tillinger, in his 17th (!) MTC assignment]. I call Alan the Moliere of our era. His descriptions of `happy' marriages will remain in our minds forever." The line landed with appreciative hoots.

Two octogenarian icons with ties to the cast gave out the greatest glitter on opening night: Walter Cronkite, on the arm of opera's Joanna Simon, was there to support Rush, his daughter-in-law, and Lauren Bacall came out for her son by the late Jason Robards.

What she didn't give a good review to was the first-night crowd. "This audience was a pain in the ass," she groused, "but opening-night audiences are a nightmare anyway."

Rosemary Harris, Bacall's co-star in Waiting in the Wings, attended the show with two co-star gal-pals, All Over's Myra Carter and Wings' Patricia Connolly. The day before, Harris began rehearsals with John Cullum, Gene Farber and director Blanka Zizka for Ariel Dorfman's The Other Side, which will be accorded its American premiere Dec. 6 on MTC's Stage One at City Center. "I play an old, but vigorous, lady," she chirped.

Farber, Dorfman and Zizka were, in fact, all in the opening-night wave, as were a number of other future MTC employees: Pulitzer Prize playwright Nilo Cruz, Rent director Michael Greif and actor Pedro Pascal (Beauty of the Father, which will occupy Stage II starting Jan. 10); playwright David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole, Feb. 2 at the Biltmore), and actor Michael Tucker, who'll play a dad ("a role I think I can handle") in Robert Aguirre-Sacasa's Based on a Totally True Story (Michael Bush, MTC's third-in-command after Executive Producer Barry Grove, will direct its world-premiere).

Whitehead and Rush, a vaudeville-act card if ever there was one, are the seasoned farceurs on board Absurd Person Singular, "together again" for the first time since they were the burglar and the bimbo in the original 1984 edition of Michael Frayn's knockabout Noises Off. There's a lot of Noises Off in their current outing, what with kitchen doors opening and closing all the time on holiday revelers in the next room, but very little is done by the cast, according to Whitehead—"just snatches, nothing sustained."

He's quite familiar with the stuffy, old-guard prig he's asked to play here, the sort who uses "Old Sausage" as a term of endearment for his spouse of the moment and can't imagine why she takes offense. "Alan Ayckbourn writes very well for a certain type of Englishman, and I'm glad to be the spokesman. We both know him quite well, I think."

And he likes the fact that the play, by turns and acts, goes from comedy to farce to drama. "We do all three in this. The mood changes. It isn't quite a farce in the first act. It has farcical moments, but it's an in-and-out comedy. The second act goes quite farcical—with people getting electrocuted and attempting suicide. It's rather difficult to pull off."

He has the role originated by Richard Kiley, and Rush follows Geraldine Page into hers. "Geraldine and I worked together in a movie called Honky Tonky Highway. We played nuns—she was Mother Superior, and I was Sister Inferior—and we became very dear friends after that very long shoot. I felt that Geraldine was pushing me to do this role."

The other four cast members are relatively new to Broadway: Ruck recently did the Leo Bloom part in The Producers; Enos and Robards got Tony nominations for their recent Broadway debuts—she in the last Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and he in The Man Who Had All the Luck—and Lewis, an Off-Broadway fixture (Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight, Writer's Block, Last Easter), is just now getting around to her Broadway bow. Continued...