`COLLECTED STORIES' BUILDS TO BITTER END.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Theater Critic

There comes a moment near the end of the Geffen Playhouse production of ``Collected Stories'' when actress Linda Lavin lets out a wail of such towering, irredeemable despair, it may fleetingly cross your mind that you've been watching a kind of condensed, post-feminized version of ``King Lear.''

Lavin's character, a famous but fading short-story writer named Ruth Steiner, is recoiling in horror from the youthful monster she has helped create. Her one-time protege and former graduate student, Lisa Morrison (Samantha Mathis), has just scored a brilliant literary coup at Ruth's personal expense. The more Lisa protests her innocence and defends her actions, the more Ruth feels intellectually betrayed and emotionally violated.

The desolate howl that Lavin emits as the scene nears its climax seems to come from the depths of Ruth's subconscious, like a tornado whipping through an underground tunnel. That we've come to expect such wrenching veracity from this Tony and Emmy award-winning actress hardly makes the moment less impressive.

Lavin's powerhouse and - until that shattering finale - coolly amusing performance is easily one of the best this season at a major L.A. playhouse.

Yet that's not the only reason to revisit playwright Donald Margulies' invigorating 3-year-old drama, which premiered in 1996 at South Coast Repertory in Orange County, where it was originally commissioned.

Conceived as a sort of '90s New York literary-world treatment of ``All About Eve,'' with a pedigree that reaches back to the Henry James novella ``The Aspern Papers'' and Vladimir Nabokov's ``Pale Fire,'' ``Collected Stories'' is a play that gains in force and originality as it moves forward.

True, the issues Margulies raises aren't exactly hot off the press: the tension between art and authenticity, the blurred line between fact and the necessary fictions that sustain our lives and identities, the way in which successive generations cannibalize each other's memories and creative juices for art and profit.

But as he did with an earlier work, ``Sight Unseen,'' Margulies here is able to sculpt an abstract subject with humanistic tools and bring it to life in concise and compelling dramatic episodes. It's the supple, jazzlike riffing and abrupt dynamic shifts that absorb you most in a Margulies play.

Appropriately, jazz is playing somewhere in the background when Lisa (Samantha Mathis) first shows up for a graduate tutorial in creative writing at Ruth's stylish Greenwich Village apartment.

For Lisa, a willowy, WASPy, budding fiction writer from the dull 'burbs, this first encounter has the quality of a pilgrimage. Lisa has read everything Ruth has written, and idolizes the '50s New York literary milieu in which Ruth came of age. ``Being here, studying with you,'' Lisa gushes to Ruth, ``it's like a religious experience.''

An academic star as well as a famous writer, Ruth is not unaccustomed to such hero worship nor averse to it. Despite Ruth's imperious bearing and mask of jaded irony, the flickers of self-doubting vulnerability that Lavin flashes suggest the childless Ruth has come to rely on the comfort of worshipful surrogate daughters like Lisa.

As Lisa matures over the play's six-year time frame, evolving into Ruth's assistant, confidante, peer and, finally, rival, the two women's symbiotic dependency deepens. Each needs the other to validate her own self-image. Each feeds off the other's vital life forces, ``rewriting'' them to suit her own changing needs.

That's basically what writers do, Ruth explains. ``You have a story to tell, tell it,'' she instructs Lisa. ``Don't flinch, just do it.''

It's a piece of advice that will come back to haunt Ruth, just as the play as a whole is haunted by the figure of the late poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), patron saint of squandered, embittered genius.

In a way, ``Collected Stories'' sandbags the audience, drawing us in with an intimate character study, then delivering an emotional body blow. Director Gilbert Cates lets the action build beautifully, peaking at exactly the right points.

When the showdown comes between Ruth and Lisa, Margulies allows both women to have their say. And while Lavin gets the last word, Mathis, like her character, proves she's a young talent to be reckoned with.

Margulies has said that his play was inspired by a much-publicized flap a few years ago involving the American writer David Leavitt and the venerable British poet Stephen Spender. At issue was whether Leavitt had plagiarized an episode from Spender's autobiography and thinly disguised it as fiction. (A British judge ruled that he did, and Leavitt's book was pulled from the shelves.) The media seized on the incident as an illustration of the conflict between private lives and public exploitation.

Not coincidentally, perhaps, certain exchanges of dialogue in ``Collected Stories'' read too much like journalism, particularly in the early going. Occasionally, the play's literary conceits feel overly schematic and self-conscious, even given its well-read protagonists.

But if Margulies has mostly restated familiar themes here, he has done so eloquently and movingly. The Geffen's crackling production shows just how good this important young storyteller can be.

THE FACTS

What: ``Collected Stories.''

Where: The Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood Village.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays, 2 p.m. matinee June 2; through June 13.

Tickets: $30 to $40. $10 student rush tickets available 15 minutes prior to curtain.

Our rating: Three and one half stars.

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Photo

Photo: ``Collected Stories'' follows the relationship between an aspiring young writer (Samantha Mathis), left, and her literary mentor (Linda Lavin), their friendship eventually turning to rivalry.