British playwright Jonathan Harvey's Beautiful Thing may have its New York debut sometime in late fall, according to press rep Sam Rudy. The play will be mounted by Chicago's Famous Door Theatre, which presented the American premiere of the work in Chicago last May.

The show had been announced as going into the Cherry Lane Theatre in October, according to Rudy. In may still book the Greenwich Village space. A spokesman at Cherry Lane terms Thing a definite candidate. Regardless, Famous Door hopes to find a suitable theatre by late fall.

Beautiful Thing first saw the light of day at London's Bush Theatre in a production that starred a then-unknown Johnny Lee Miller (subsequently to achieve fame as Sickboy in the film, "Trainspotting") as one of two teen-age boys acting on his dawning sexuality.

A Donmar Warehouse production in London in 1993 was a recast restaging, and subsequently transferred to the Duke of York's, before it was turned into a warmly-embraced movie.

The play captures the awakening love between two male teenagers growing up in southeast London. If Beautiful Thing makes it to Off-Broadway, it would be the second Chicago show to arrive this autumn. Killer Joe, a big hit for Evanston, IL's Next Theatre in 1993, will receive a commercial production in Soho in October. The upcoming mounting is not connected to Next Theatre but will feature two of its actors and utilize the same director.

-- By Robert Simonson and Lawrence Bommer