BRAVO FOR `HUGHIE,' PACINO'S BRAVADO.

Byline: Reed Johnson Theater Critic

The first thing that catches your eye in Al Pacino's startling new production of Eugene O'Neill's ``Hughie'' is that the clock hanging above center stage doesn't have any hands. It's as if the two desperate men standing beneath it were frozen in time, suspended in some sleazy Times Square purgatory beyond hope or salvation.

Written by the 52-year-old O'Neill as part of a cycle of one-act monologues, ``Hughie,'' with a running time of barely an hour, plays like a Cliff Notes version of ``The Iceman Cometh,'' the author's four-hour late-career masterpiece.

In ``Hughie,'' O'Neill distilled his mordant worldview into a 40-proof shot of black humor, bitter epigrams and pitch-perfect urban slang. Though naturalistic in its plotting, dialogue and Jazz Age mis-en-scene, ``Hughie'' has a surreal undertow, an expressionistic tension that permeates the action like ether. Before you quite know what you're inhaling, you're already under its spell.

Pulling double duty here as director and star, Pacino, along with his inspired design team, makes the case that while ``Hughie'' is a miniature work, it's not necessarily a minor one. It's doubtful this 1941 drama has ever felt more ageless, more vitally of the moment, than it does right now at the Mark Taper Forum.

For the record, the year is 1928, the hour between 3 and 4 a.m., the place the lobby of a down-at-the-heels Manhattan hotel. Or, to put it another way, it is an era of hubristic optimism, at a time of profound melancholy, in a part of America where the principal order of business is to sucker or be suckered.

This is where Erie Smith (Pacino), a small-time gambler and part-time petty hood, has come to unload his last respects to Hughie, the hotel's recently deceased night clerk and Erie's personal talisman. Despondent over Hughie's death, Erie is coming off a five-day drinking binge, ready to pour out his life story to Hughie's unwitting replacement, a stone-faced fellow named, of all things, Charlie Hughes (Paul Benedict).

Over the next 55 minutes, Erie will reminisce about his dead friend with a mixture of fondness and scorn, crack off-color jokes, and boast about the ponies he bets and the Ziegfeld dolls he supposedly beds. Hughes will pretend to listen while his own mind goes sleep-walking through the dark city streets, in search of its own lurid fictions. For all their differences, Erie, the shabby hustler, and Hughes the bored family man, will become locked in a waltz of co-dependent delusion.

Essentially an extended monologue in which Erie slices open a vein and the night clerk watches him bleed raw emotion, ``Hughie'' contains some of the most elaborate stage notes ever written. O'Neill supplied the night clerk with line after line of unspoken ruminations, giving the actor playing him some way of pacing his character's emotional evolution while Erie spills his guts.

In conceiving this production, Pacino had the bright idea of letting Benedict speak the clerk's thoughts aloud, using miking that gives them a sepulchral echo. This effect, alternately creepy and ironically amusing, combined with David Gallo's set design of oppressive cutaways of skyscrapers and fire escapes, Donald Holder's Edward Hopper-esque lighting and Jon Gottlieb's sound design of rumbling motor cars and far-off snatches of music, casts a suitably metaphysical pall over the encounter.

Carefully offsetting these abstract elements, Pacino makes Erie emphatically, almost heroically, of the fleshy here and now. Manic enthusiasm and scrappy self-importance come easily to this actor, who falters only when he tries to dredge deep feelings from a man rarely prone to self-excavation.

Everything about this sentimental mercenary seems fittingly oversized: his sexual bravado, his rumpled off-white suit, and the painful isolation that surrounds his life. Pacino inflates Erie's low-life defeats to near-tragic proportions.

Making the most of what could have been an invisible role, Benedict conveys wary humor and mild-mannered reserve masking a raging inner resignation. Though Benedict can't make the night clerk's last-minute conversion fully plausible, he and Pacino turn their duet into a dirge of sublime dissonance.

Sixty years after ``Hughie'' was written, Pacino has exhumed from this rarely produced play O'Neill's masterly and concise summing-up of existence. It's a creative eulogy for an artist who'd concluded that romance and fatalism, success and failure, are but twin sides of a two-headed coin. Whichever way you call it, the odds don't exactly look great.

THE FACTS

What: ``Hughie.''

Where: Mark Taper Forum, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays; through July 25.

Tickets: $29 to $40. All performances are sold out. However, a limited number of public rush tickets for performances through July 18 will be available via a lottery system. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three and one half stars.

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Photo

Photo: Al Pacino, right, engages Paul Benedict in a one-sided conversation in Eugene O'Neill's one-act dialogue, ``Hughie'' at the Mark Taper Forum.

John Lazar/Daily News