THE SET'S THE THING : 'Thoroughly Modern Millie' & 'Fortune's Fool'.

What child is here," the sixteenth-century poet Sir Philip Sidney wondered in a moment of theater-related skepticism, "that, coming to a play and seeing 'Thebes' written in great letters on an old door, does believe that it is Thebes?"

Less-is-more set design, it seems, had no fan in the Elizabethan sonneteer. Had Sidney lived Methuselah-like through the centuries, instead of keeling over in battle in 1586, he might well have delighted in the more elaborate sets of a later era--the kind of meticulous constructions that occasionally spark applause and that illustrate the theater's potential for exploiting the visual arts. As Sidney's quote points out, a set can be the opening pledge in a play's bargain with its audience: it lets spectators know what approach will govern the evening's proceedings.

Just how efficiently semiotic can a set be? Well, anyone hankering for a crash course in the subject can drop in on Thoroughly Modern Millie, the singin', dancin' extravaganza that recently won the Tony Award for best musical. Based on the 1967 movie of the same title, but boasting a largely new score by composer Jeanine Tesori and lyricist Dick Scanlan, Millie is the giddy tale of a small-town girl who moves to 1920s New York, hell-bent to bob her hair and be "modern." Deftly directed by Michael Mayer, with adorably garish period costumes by Martin Pakledinaz and perky choreography by Rob Ashford (the chorus of orange- and purple-clad secretaries who tap dance while seated--at their typing tables--is particularly endearing), Millie resembles an efficient, glistening cappuccino maker, percolating show-biz zest. For fans of witty musical numbers, there are sequences like the patter song in which Millie (Sutton Foster) takes dictation from her stiff-necked boss (Marc Kudisch), and repeats it at lightning speed. For intellectuals, there are reference-loaded jokes: Tesori's jazz-curlicue score darting into Tchaikovsky parodies (The Nuttycracker Suite) during a revel in a speakeasy; offhand cocktail-party conversation accidentally inspiring George Gershwin to write Rhapsody in Blue. And for those aching to thumb their noses at political correctness, there is a ridiculous villainess (Harriet Harris) who disguises herself as a caricature of an oriental dragon lady.

This something-for-everyone aesthetic showcases a piece of reliable sentiment. Though Millie is mercenarily determined to marry a rich man ("The new woman chooses reason over romance every day of the week," she asserts), she ultimately finds that human emotions are not so easy to stifle. She may be a new woman, but she has the same heart that the old woman had. David Gallo's set immediately alerts the audience that this disillusioning of disillusionment will take place: the preshow curtain, emblazoned with a dictionary definition of the word "modern," rises to reveal a montage of skyscrapers--buildings that symbolize the modern way of life--but the cityscape is exaggeratedly elongated and awash in purples and Valentine's Day pinks. Our notions of up-to-date efficiency, the tableau suggests, are as romantic as any of the true-love cliches at which Millie sneers. The superstylized art deco exuberance of the show's subsequent sets--a sweeping penthouse balcony, a hotel with an elevator that's powered by tap dancing--only underscore the notion that modernity is a beguiling idyll.

Thematically loaded sets spell out an even more unnerving message in Fortune's Fool, Arthur Penn's knockout staging of a rarely performed play by Ivan Turgenev (adapted by Mike Poulton). Leaping into the Broadway spotlight more than 150 years after Turgenev (1818-83) wrote it, Fortune's Fool ended up competing in the Tony Award's "best play" category against Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog (about a pair of self-destructive brothers named Lincoln and Booth) and Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (about a man who falls in love with a goat). (Albee's play won.) By comparison with those slightly sensational works, the Turgenev piece might seem tame. Set on a decaying Russian country estate, the play depicts the heart-wrenching encounter between a young, newly married heiress Olga Petrovna (Enid Graham) and Vassily Semyonitch Kuzovkin (Alan Bates, winner of the Tony for best actor), an amiable, impoverished member of the landed gentry who has lived for years on her estate while ineffectually suing for the return of his own.

The relatively low-key plotting, however, only complements the comedy of Fortune's Fool's first act and the bittersweet tone of its second. Both moods contribute to the vein of social criticism that, shortly after the play's composition in 1848, led Tsarist authorities to ban it. Aristocrats, quite simply, come off badly, especially in act 1 when one of the heiress's hyperbolically snobbish neighbors (the hilarious Frank Langella, who won the Tony for best featured actor) amuses himself by plying the hapless Kuzovkin with alcohol. The sequence in which Bates slips into drunkenness, staggering around a fish-mousse-laden dining table with a napkin tucked into his shirt, must surely rank as the best five minutes of acting on Broadway all season. And the pathos of the scene pays off in act 2, when Kuzovkin and the characters must choose between truth and their financial welfare.

Private property exerts an almost gravitational attraction in Fortune's Fool, a phenomenon reflected in John Arnone's elegant slice-of-life sets. Act 1 proffers the reassuringly solid living area of the estate's principal mansion, with its cupboards and wood-paneled walls. Act 2, which foregrounds the moral and personal quandary of Olga Petrovna, ushers the audience into a more feminized world, a fabric-draped boudoir whose soft blues and greens might have been filched from one of Monet's Giverny paintings. Realistic stage constructions like these inevitably suggest that a person's environment forms his or her character. It is no accident that, in the nineteenth century, the development of three-dimensional, furniture-stocked, true-to-life stage design figured alongside Darwin's theories in the rise of theatrical naturalism. The personalities in Fortune's Fool, Arnone's sets suggest, are made fools by their fortunes.

This implication may seem to tempt a twenty-first-century audience into feeling in some ways superior to Turgenev's characters--we would not make the flawed decisions that Kuzovkin blunders into, we could think, because we do not own serfs or vast, moldering estates stocked with icons and vodka. But the sheer obliviousness of the characters in Fortune's Fool to the mind/environment connection raises the disturbing suspicion that we, ourselves, have similar blind spots. "You have to love every book, every nook, every cranny," Olga Petrovna entreats her officious husband (Benedick Bates) in act 1, moving to the nearby cupboard and stove and caressing them. For her, private property feels like a lover, not a tyrant. Watching her, one can't but wonder: Are we, similarly, made fools by the environments we live in? If we run into a "Thebes" sign, do we think we're in Thebes?