STAGE STRUCK : 'Elaine Stritch at Liberty' & 'The Last Five Years'.

Life is a performance that, for most of us, is all too rarely broken by applause. You're out of the spotlight--or, even worse, you're in it--or you're waiting in the wings, or botching your big scene, or playing a bit part in a scheme whose magnitude dwarfs your own. And even when you've pulled off your own personal coup de theatre and succeeded at something, you can be left with the nagging suspicion that people are admiring a character--a shell of personality that doesn't fully coincide with the real, inner you.

With the drama of existence so closely mirroring the drama of drama, it's perhaps no wonder that an onstage memoir like Elaine Stritch at Liberty should reduce so many critics to near-breathlessness. In the show, which sparked hysterical acclaim when it opened at New York's Public Theater last fall (and is now playing on Broadway until May 26), the eponymous seventy-six-year-old doyenne relates anecdotes from her show-biz career, segueing frequently into classic musical-theatre numbers, so that her life becomes a comment on her art, and her art a comment on all life. Sitting or standing alone on a bare stage, dressed in a white blouse and black tights in front of thirteen hundred audience members, Stritch seems brave, resilient, and charismatic, but vulnerable too. She recalls her years working and hobnobbing with entertainment luminaries like Ethel Merman, Richard Burton, Rock Hudson, and Woody Allen--but she also recounts her long battle with alcoholism. So on some level, she becomes a symbol for all of us as we come to terms with our pasts, with the good times and bad.

On another level, of course, Stritch is a Broadway Olympian whom doting audiences, and gushing critics, can only admire from afar. Famous for her roles in shows like Noel Coward's 1961 Sail Away and Stephen Sondheim's 1970 Company, the actress is still capable of spurring the New York Times, Newsday, New York Post reviewers, respectively, to language like "supernova," "bliss," and "one of the key people in the sensibility of the twentieth century." Part of the fun of attending Elaine Stritch at Liberty, therefore, lies in learning how the actress, who was raised in a Roman Catholic household outside Detroit, began her ascent into the theatrical stratosphere. As it turns out, her first stroke of good luck occurred when a sympathetic nun at her Catholic high school, aware that Stritch's parents would frown upon their daughter's stage-door dreams, arranged for her to take up lodgings at a New York City convent--a convenient and highly respectable base from which the girl was able to enroll in acting classes.

The show (whose script was "constructed" by New Yorker writer John Lahr and "reconstructed" by Stritch, as the cutely worded credits put it; George C. Wolfe directs) hits some of its funniest notes when it describes the subsequent few years, which brought the actress's Broadway debut in the "Bongo, bongo, bongo/I don't wanna leave the Congo" number in 1947's Angel in the Wings.

A good number of religious references in the first half of the show--Strich's account of saying a few rapid Hail Marys before accepting an ultimately disastrous date with Marlon Brando; a description of an equally unproductive marriage-preparation course with a non-Catholic fiance--hint at the culture shock the actress must have experienced while metamorphosing from a Convent of the Sacred Heart schoolgirl to a diva on the Great White Way. (The theatre's uneasy relationship with Christianity, after all, dates back to the days of Tertullian, who said some nasty things about the morality of acting.) But the real conflict in Elaine Stritch at Liberty involves the actress's struggle with alcoholism--an addiction so severe that, to outwit one production's no-booze-backstage policy, she arranged for champagne bottles with doctored corks and phony well-wishers' cards to be delivered to her dressing room.

The drinking, as the show makes clear, was inseparable from the larger issue of her fear--a stage fright that had a downright existential edge. At one point in the show Stritch sums up the philosophy that governed the years of addiction: "You're scared; you drink; you're not scared. What is the problem?" But there was a problem, of course, and eventually she recognized the necessity of kicking her habit and "reclaiming my life." Toward the end of the show she reels off a list of the people who helped her through those difficult times, but as an audience member one is left with an image of insuperable loneliness. Stritch's stage fright is a version of everyone's fear--of taking action, being alive, being autonomous.

The isolation of the individual psyche emerges even more clearly in a new two-person show that, in mirror image to the highly nostalgic Stritch production, points forward to the musical-theatre horizon. A smart, wrenchingly poignant study of a failed marriage between two artists, The Last Five Years is the latest work by Jason Robert Brown, a young-lion composer/librettist whose name usually surfaces, along with four or five others, in discussions of the up-and-coming theatrical composers who are producing the most interesting work today. The show, directed with shrewdness and dry humor by Daisy Prince, premiered at the Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois, and recently opened off-Broadway.

Faced with the challenge of avoiding the hackneyed while tackling an old-chestnut topic--the blossoming and withering of romance--Brown, whose Parade won the Tony Award for best original musical score in 1999, has hit on an ingenious device: running the love story both forward and backward in time. The Last Five Years introduces us to Jamie (played with irresistibly edgy charisma by Norbert Leo Butz), a young, seductive, and insufferably egoistic New York novelist whose career is accelerating like the space shuttle down the runway, while the eclat of his actress wife Cathy (Sherie Rene Scott) tops out at summer theatre in Ohio. The variance in the couple's accomplishments might be enough to scuttle the marriage--and it can't help that he is Jewish and she, one might assume from one or two script references and a moment when she crosses herself, is Catholic.

What makes the story heartbreaking, though, is Brown's narrative gimmick: while the musical follows Jamie from the relationship's beginning to the bitter end, it shows Cathy living the liaison in reverse, from the breakup to the time when the love was thrilling and packed with promise. The focus alternates between the characters; the two actors rarely occupy the same scene, and when they do, they don't communicate: We see husband harangue his mute wife beside a Christmas tree topped with a Star of David; we hear wife mourn her husband's solipsism as she perches on a brick-red pile of copies of his novel. Even Beowulf Boritt's set--a backdrop bearing a bird's-eye view of a wedding chapel on the left, and, on the far right, a facade of cascading packing boxes--emphasizes the irreconcilability of the spouses' points of view. And the recurrent image of the circle--a revolving set, a clock face transformed by Christine Binder's lighting into a stained-glass church window--emphasizes Jamie and Cathy's self-contained worlds.

In one of Brown's many witty and biting lyrics, Jamie tips his hat to his own smugness: "I left Columbia and don't regret it--/I wrote a book and Sonny Mehta read it!/My heart's been stolen! /My ego's swollen!/I just keep rollin' along." We use success, as well as failure, as a way to cordon ourselves off from others, of course; but The Last Five Years mourns a broader human failing: the fact that one can fall in love, and even marry, and remain trapped in the prison of the self.