A Perfect Ganesh.

Compared to Bowles, Terrence McNally is a very direct, very explicit playwright. I say this hesitantly because in A Perfect Ganesh (recently at the Manhattan Theatre Club), his two serious ladies travel to India where they meet a variety of men (all played by two actors, one of whom wears the elephant head of Ganesha) and where they come to terms--or almost come to terms--with their various guilts and losses.

Margaret (Frances Sternhagen) is rigid, defensive, and far too neat; she uses her sense of propriety and her very sharp tongue to mask the pain she still feels at the accidental death of her first child years before and the less painful fact that her marriage is no marriage. Kitty (Zoe Caldwell) is sloppy, forgetful, open to new experiences, but is dogged by guilt at having waited too long to accept her son's homosexuality. He died of a beating before she could reach him and he wanders, blood-stained, around the stage and her mind until she manages to separate her prejudices from those of his killers. She has come to India to kiss a leper on the lips, she says, and she finally does. This is presumably her willingness to accept all of life, its ugliness as well as its beauty (Ganesha is the embodiment of this idea), but I confess to being a little ill-at-ease at an image which seems to be making an analogy between leprosy and homosexuality. When McNally kills off Kitty's husband in her absence, he seems to be laying it on a bit thickly; but perhaps the playwright wants some kind of balance between the marriages of the two characters. At the end, these two old friends have become friends in a deeper sense, sharers of each other's burdens. Both women are very funny in their very different ways and McNally has given characteristic comic lines to both of them. Although the two male actors (Dominic Cuskern and Fisher Stevens) have much tricky work to do as they shift from character to character, it is the two women who are at the center of the play. Sternhagen and Caldwell are a pleasure to watch, whether they are going for laughs or tears (more properly, sentiment too tough for easy tears).