COMMUNE-ISH PLOT THICKENS ON BROOK FARM : THE FACTS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Decades before bohemians colonized Greenwich Village and West Hollywood, a small cadre of Americans tried building utopia on 179 acres of Massachusetts cow pasture. Founded in 1841, Brook Farm became a famous hotbed of free thinking, a place where writers, proto-feminists and lapsed Harvard divinity students could bale hay, churn butter, debate the great issues of the time and pursue amorous experiments.

The lifestyle they cultivated was a romantic one, in every sense, and their escapades have cried out for a worthy chronicler. Nathaniel Hawthorne, a onetime Brook Farm regular, took a crack in ``The Blithedale Romance,'' an acerbic portrait of what happens when Emersonian idealists suddenly find themselves knee-deep in manure.

We now have Mark Lee's ``An American Romance,'' a shapely, literate comic drama receiving its world premiere at North Hollywood's Road Theatre Company. The first of a planned trilogy about Hawthorne and his fellow free spirits, Lee's play succeeds in turning a complex group of American originals into believable, appealingly flawed human beings. Though you won't learn many details about, say, transcendentalist philosophy or abolitionism, you'll likely enjoy eavesdropping for two hours on these painfully high-minded Yankee eggheads in search of a national identity.

A gentlemen's co-op, Brook Farm was set up by former Unitarian minister George Ripley (the amusingly haughty James K. Ward) and his wife, Sophia (Taylor Gilbert), as a place of social and sexual equality. At Brook Farm, rules were made to be broken - or at least talked about being broken.

So when Hawthorne (a charismatic John Rafter Lee) arrives at the commune near the start of Act 1, he finds feminist Margaret Fuller (Ann Gillespie) arguing passionately that a man's place is in the kitchen.

Gillespie's vehemently righteous Fuller finds the perfect foil in Charles King Newcomb (David Holcomb), an Ivy League fop who likes to rattle his elders with irreverent quips about art, religion and a host of un-Puritanical practices. In the brainy crucible of Brook Farm, every discussion was an intellectual wrestling match, every parlor game a debate. Lee's dialogue makes these encounters crackle with insightful wit.

At first, Hawthorne serves as the play's catalyst, his skeptical, uptight personality clashing with the missionarylike zeal of his new bunkmates. But Lee spurs the second act by introducing a pair of fictional outsiders, a feisty, alabaster Irish beauty (Marci Hill) and her macho, possessive husband (Rich Willis). Refugees of the potato famine, the couple's ardent, working-class sexual appetites give the genteel Brook Farmers all the romance they can handle. This leads to a shedding of clothes and Puritan scruples in an overheated, dreamlike sequence that briefly threatens to turn the play into a kind of ``Big Chill'' for English majors.

Fortunately, Lee knows how to make fun of his characters without making them seem silly. He holds them at an affectionate distance, while the excellent Road cast does some of the best ensemble work this season.

Director John Lawler artfully exploits the play's central conflict between intellect and animal instinct, the lofty vs. the down-to-earth. Preston Craig's set design expresses that metaphor potently, with a cutaway backdrop of clouds and blue sky countered by a monstrous fake dung heap at stage right (an infamous mound that Brook Farmers dubbed ``the gold mine'').

The play takes a couple of false steps, notably an eerily staged seance scene that chiefly serves to push the plot. But Lee reinforces the reputation he gained with ``Rebel Armies Deep Into Chad'' as one of our few contemporary writers whose knowledge of human affairs goes beyond suburban angst. ``An American Romance'' is a thoughtful, entertaining picture not only of an America that was, but of an America that might've been.

What: ``An American Romance.''

Where: The Road Theatre, Lankershim Arts Center, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 7 p.m. Sundays; through Aug. 17.

Tickets: $15.

Our rating: Three and 1/2 stars (includes brief nudity).

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Photo: Ann Gillespie, left, Marci Hill and Taylor Gilbert get a toehold on communal living in ``An American Romance,'' Mark Lee's comic drama about the experimental Brook Farm.