New York Note

If you want to see Nathan Lane in a big white bunny suit, now's your chance.

Terrence McNally (Master Class, Love!Valour!Compassion!) is premiering his new play, Dedication or the Stuff of Dreams, at Primary Stages (an elegant small venue at 59 E. 59th St).

Lane's character, Lou Nuncle, runs a children's theater (thus the bunny suit) in a small town. He and his partner, Jessie (Alison Fraser), passionately believe in the power of theater to improve and enrich life, and their dedication (thus the title) is the little engine (that could) that drives the play. I freely confess to being a sucker for theater plays, and as soon as somebody says, in effect, "I know! Let's put on a show!" I'm hooked. Well, potentially hooked.

The theatrical backstory of the production is charming and ironical, one of those only-in-show-business sagas: McNally has had a long relationship with Manhattan Theatre Club; MTC was moving to its new home in 2003, the rehabilitated Biltmore Theatre, which had been a vacant wreck for 16 years — there were fabulous stories of various unwelcome residents: homeless people who set fires, alligators and, of course, rats. The rescue of the Biltmore was the inspiration and occasion of McNally's writing Dedication and it was supposed to inaugurate the restored venue. But MTC decided against the script (and no wonder, but more on that later), and it was first performed at Williamstown last summer — where it was the last show performed in that theater, which was then torn down.

But wait, there's more.

Lane and McNally are old friends, and the role of Lou was written for Lane. But when Primary Stages picked up the script, Peter Frechette got the role; two weeks before opening, Frechette quit to make a movie. After searching high and low for a replacement, Nathan Lane told McNally that he would take the role and save the day. Now, wouldn't that make a good comedy — starring Nathan Lane?

What McNally has written is neither funny nor moving; a wealthy woman (Marian Seldes) is dying of a painful cancer; she owns the town's derelict theater; she offers it to Lou if he will kill her — using a pillow found in the theater's basement which was used to smother Desdemona in an long-ago production of Othello. The Othello reference has no resonance, nor do any of the other many many allusions bandied about in the dialogue. In fact, despite the play's being about how thrilling theater is, it is profoundly untheatrical — no magic, no "love and laughter," no nothing. There are a bunch of subplots that seem to go nowhere: a bratty rock star daughter, an affair with the technical director, the fact that Lou is gay, etc., etc. Compounding the script's lack of focus is acting that's so artificial it seems self-parodic. A disappointment all around.