`AFFLICTION' ERUDITE, LIGHT.

Byline: Reed Johnson Theater Critic

Describing Frank Dwyer's ``The Affliction of Glory: A Comedy About Tragedy'' as a ``play of ideas'' is sort of like describing the Harvard English department as a bunch of wise guys.

This engagingly eggheaded, if sometimes slow-moving, play about (among many, many other things) the dumbing-down of popular culture is a show with enough mental firepower to spark a dozen Ph.D. dissertations.

You practically can hear the author's mental synapses popping in the background of the Getty Center's Harold M. Williams Auditorium, where ``The Affliction of Glory'' opened a limited 15-performance run Wednesday night. Dwyer is conceivably the only dramatist on either side of the Atlantic who could make Tom Stoppard sound like an ignoramus.

Yet ``The Affliction of Glory'' bears a more than passing resemblance to Stoppard's own ``Arcadia,'' in which the mysteries of the unquiet past create a literary sleuthing game for several intrepid members of the confused present.

The playwright, who also is a poet, director and literary manager of the Mark Taper Forum, has attempted the Herculean task of writing a play to mark an unusual collaboration among three of L.A.'s premier cultural institutions.

Earlier this month, the Getty and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens opened twin exhibitions of paintings and drawings honoring Sarah Siddons, the regal, porcelain-skinned British actress whose tragic performances were said to make men cry and force women to be carried from London theaters in hysterics. Co-commissioned by the Getty and the Taper/Center Theatre Group, ``The Affliction of Glory'' adds another dimension to the exploration of Siddons' formidable myth.

Known in her heyday as ``the Muse of Tragedy,'' Siddons (1755-1831) was cursed with the inability to play comedy convincingly - or, at least, to convince her idolatrous fans that she should play it. (Think Meryl Streep in corsets and uncomfortable shoes.)

As Dwyer expresses it in the clever neo-Regency parlance he has crafted for his talented and resourceful three-person cast (J.D. Cullum, Nike Doukas, Patrick Egan), Siddons was ``betrayed by the sublime.'' Like one of her venerable portraitists, the great Sir Joshua Reynolds, she was an artist boxed in by the humdrum tastes of Britain's burgeoning 18th-century middle classes, who couldn't see that ``tragedies are concocted and irrelevant,'' whereas great comedy is ``serious business.''

If you're already scanning this page for footnotes, don't sweat it. Though his script occasionally gets stalled in muddy fens of allusion to 18th-century bowdlerizations of ``King Lear'' or the neo-republican leanings of ``Paradise Lost,'' Dwyer for the most part skillfully wrestles this abstract clay into compelling flesh-and-blood portraits.

His smartest conceit is making the play switch back and forth, Pirandello style, from Siddons (Dukas), Reynolds (Cullum) and their dynamic milieu to August 1999, when Bill (Cullum), a cerebral actor-playwright, and Polly (Dukas), his scrappy co-star, muse and significant other, are rehearsing a play about Sarah Siddons.

For Bill and Polly, trying to make sense of Siddons' world and her mystique triggers very modern questions not only about the conflicting roles of wife, mother and actress that Siddons played, but also about the difficulty of understanding her incredible appeal. In some ways, ``The Affliction of Glory'' is about the impossibility of truly knowing the past.

Cullum and Dukas make Bill and Polly's brainy bickering quite amusing, particularly in the Act 2 sequence when Polly recites one of Siddons' legendary speeches, inserting squawks whenever the flowery language (``Come, come, come, come, nay, come!'') seques from sublime to ridiculous.

Both Cullum and Egan show remarkable versatility in a variety of supporting roles, including Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, William Blake, a wandering German theater lover, a flamboyant Italian painter and the wonderfully dotty English king (Egan) and queen (Cullum), who address each other as Big Silly and Little Silly.

That kind of ``Beyond the Fringe'' inspired looniness helps deflate what might otherwise become an overwhelming sense of self-importance. Corey Madden's direction, like John Iacovelli's utilitarian set design, is sparsely effective. Candice Cain's period costumes are without flaw.

Dwyer and company have lifted Siddon's 2-D image off the wall and set her before us in all her 3-D complexity. Not a perfect play, perhaps, but a glorious enterprise.

The Facts

What: ``The Affliction of Glory: A Comedy About Tragedy.''

Where: Harold M. Williams Auditorium, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood.

When: Through Sept. 5. Performances at 8 p.m. today, Saturday, Thursday, Aug. 27, 28, Sept. 2, 3, 4; 2:30 p.m. Saturday, Sunday, Aug. 28, 29, Sept. 4, 5.

Tickets: $28; students, seniors $22. Call [phone] or visit the Mark Taper Forum Web site, www.TaperAhmanson.com. Getty parking reservations are acquired; a $5 parking fee is included with ticket purchase.

Our rating: Three stars.

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Photo

PHOTO J.D. Cullum, left, Nike Doukas and Patrick Egan co-star in ``The Affliction of Glory: A Comedy About Tragedy,'' at the Getty Center.