GREAT SIMON'S GHOST ROMANCE GOES BEYOND GRAVE IN UNEVEN 'ROSE AND WALSH'.

Byline: Evan Henerson Theater Critic

HOW TRULY finished, do you suppose, was ``The Odd Couple'' lo those many years ago when it went into previews? What about ``Lost in Yonkers,'' an eventual Pulitzer Prize winner, or ``Brighton Beach Memoirs,'' the beginning of Neil Simon's boffo autobiographical trilogy? What must those scripts have looked like at the 11th hour?

Dogging Neil Simon, almost as consistently as his reputation for comedy, is the playwright's legendary ability to tweak, alter and even overhaul his work on its way to the stage. Here's a man who last year updated one of his most successful works for the second time!. The playwright's very memoirs are titled ``Rewrites.''

How much ``in progress'' Simon's latest - ``Rose and Walsh'' - still is, only the playwright, his director and his cast will know. Given what's on stage at the Geffen Playhouse, I suspect Simon might have welcomed another several go-rounds with the red pen. By turns movingly elegiac and structurally messy, ``Rose and Walsh'' seems to prove some kind of rewriter's axiom: if you can't resolve the play you're writing, add a second and hope nobody will notice. Admittedly, we can be awfully forgiving when we're in the seasoned company of actors like Jane Alexander and Len Cariou.

Loosely inspired by the romance between Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, ``Rose and Walsh'' is a pair of love stories, each with a kind of twist. Alexander's Rose Steiner - a literary legend with failing eyesight and writer's block - nightly summons the ghost of her lover, Walsh McLarren (Cariou). He's been dead for 25 years, but in Rose's ultrarealistic psyche, Walsh returns as witty and irascible as ever. The nature of their real-life romance, then, is re-created in Rose's fantasies, sex and all. She doesn't even bother to edit out Walsh's exasperating qualities. That's how much she loves him.

Does he respond in kind? The beauty of Cariou's performance is in his depiction of off-handed affection - in what he doesn't need to say. Walsh services Rose because he has been called, but he's got an agenda, and he won't let Rose get away with anything.

Walsh is nearing what would have been his 65th birthday, meaning - in ghost logic, apparently - that he'll be leaving forever. However, he's got an unfinished manuscript that Rose never knew existed and which, if published, would solve Rose's financial woes. But the book needs a, ahem!, ghost writer to bring it to completion. Rose and Walsh settle on Gavin Clancy (David Aaron Baker), who wrote a promising paperback thriller called ``Rest in Pieces'' before developing his own writer's block.

By the time the second act rolls around, Simon has abandoned the ``unpublished Walsh'' plot line to lead Rose into another quandary. The Rose/Walsh romance has had unforeseen effects on Rose's relationship with her younger live-in assistant, Arlene (Marin Hinkle), a character who isn't what she first seems to be. With Walsh gone, a now fading Rose has to come to terms with some of her tougher life choices and their consequences. That Arlene has fallen for the still ambitious Clancy - and he for her - is almost obligatory.

In director David Esbjornson's hands, ``Rose and Walsh'' feels less like a Neil Simon play than you might expect. The tone is more rueful, the comedy less insistent and cloying - and often masking real pain. There are plenty of laughs, however, and Simon can't help milking the ``Who's she talking to?'' gags when Rose - with Walsh in the room - first meets Clancy.

If ``Rose and Walsh'' feels thematically all over the map, Alexander is the glue that holds the strands uncomfortably together. An actress who suggests gentility, she slips easily into the guise of a woman of steel who is nonetheless quite needy. The tenderness of her scenes with Cariou's Walsh and Hinkle's Arlene nicely mirror each other.

Pity her two co-stars get slighted. Act 1 needs more of Hinkle while Act 2 suffers from Cariou's absence. Simon may have intended to write ``Rose and Walsh and Arlene,'' but the Geffen offering feels like a curious hybrid in need of reworking. Then again, if anybody is capable of fixing this play, that person is Neil Simon - 75 years old and still rewriting strong.

ROSE AND WALSH - Three stars

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

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; to March 9.

Tickets: $28 to $46. Call [phone].

In a nutshell: Jane Alexander shines in what feels like an unfinished Neil Simon production.

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Death doesn't stop Len Cariou from continuing to fulfill Jane Alexander's, uh, needs in ``Rose and Walsh.''