Taking Sides.

The Broadway production of Ronald Harwood's play Taking Sides, just closed, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, begins with the strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and ends with his Ninth, and all the way through attempts to be as weightily significant.

Harwood has centered his play around the life of Wilhelm Furtwangler, the noted German conductor whose reputation was tainted by association with the Nazis. While many other artists fled the country when Hitler came to power, Furtwangler remained, conducting widely in Germany, and thus seemed to benefit from the Nazi regime. Using these facts as his premise, Harwood has worked an ethical debate into dramatic form. Art, guilt, idealism, moral imperative - despite the compelling storyline, the philosophy drifts more toward the seminar than the theater.

Fortunately, the impassioned, and sometimes comic, performances of the two leads keep the production lively. In the stark Berlin office that constitutes the play's single set - desks, a door, a phonograph, and a pile of rubble in the street beyond - it is the contrasting acting styles of Ed Harris, as an American military investigator, and Daniel Massey, as Furtwangler, that provide the spectacle.

Harris does a brilliant job creating the character of Major Steve Arnold, the boorish but well-intentioned officer charged with digging up the dirt on Furtwangler in preparation for a de-Nazification hearing. A philistine and proud of it, Arnold grimaces when he hears Beethoven, calls Furtwangler a "band leader," and addresses him to his face as "Wilhelm." Harris fleshes out the character with meticulously realistic mannerisms - he sniffs, drawls, and swaggers, leans on his desk with his knuckles, slaps his colleagues briskly on the back. As the play waffles into abstraction, this performance, at least, is concrete.

Massey, on the other hand, has created a character who thrives on the immaterial. When he stomps into Arnold's office-cum-courtroom, staring perplexedly from beneath bushy white eyebrows, he looks rather like an owl that has just flown into a window. He sways a little as he stands - his center of balance seems a bit off - and his arms swing loosely around him, as though he weren't sure what to do with them outside of an orchestra pit. His Furtwangler seems almost cartoonish, but appropriately so - this, clearly, is a man who lives on a different plane from ordinary humans.

Is it moral to opt for intangibles, as Furtwangler seems to, the play asks? Is it possible to be apolitical? Does genius deserve respect for being genius? Can music inspire? Can you separate an artist's work from his life? Do artistic standards lose their clarity amidst the chiaroscuro of good and evil?

These questions coil themselves into a not-so-subtle subtext as Arnold scrabbles for evidence to prove that Furtwangler is not the political naif he claims to be. Arnold is all too familiar with prudent duplicity: as the script reminds us several times, he is a former insurance adjuster. Also straining to shoulder metaphysical weight are characters like the staunch young Jewish lieutenant David Wills (Michael Stuhlbarg), who believes that Furtwangler deserves a little respect, and the widowed Tamara Sachs (Ann Dowd), who recalls the conductor's assistance to numerous Jews. "How can you find out the truth?" Sachs demands of Arnold. "There's no such thing....Whose truth?"

David Jones's straightforward production keeps pace with the script's earnestness. At the beginning of act 1, a single spotlight in the middle of the dark stage illuminates two items in the Berlin office: a phonograph, and a stack of records on a chair. This focused image, like the play as a whole, seems to zoom in on past layers of history to capture the symbolic. The crimes or virtues of Furtwangler's private life remain obscure, shrouded in layers of complexity; the part of him conferred to the public - his musical achievement - remains fixed in a halo.

One street further up Broadway, at the Walter Kerr Theatre, a production is taking a comic view of a great artist's debt to his image. A witty cross between a drawing-room comedy and a farce, Noel Coward's 1939 play Present Laughter portrays a very bad week in the life of a conceited theatrical darling and his ever-increasing circle of annoying hangers-on. The shrewd and hilarious production directed by Scott Elliott occupies the opposite end of the theatrical spectrum from Taking Sides: every speech and piece of stage business falls into place to celebrate the sheer fun of performance.

The seduction starts when you enter the theater, with its gilt and peach paneling, and find veteran cabaret artist Steve Ross playing a grand piano on the edge of the stage. Ross, his hair parted exactly down the middle, sits in front of a mansion's gray facade, playing songs from the thirties. As the house lights dim and a dappled glow plays over the facade, Ross launches into a few Noel Coward songs, including the priceless "Mrs. Worthington":

Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington;

Don't put your daughter on the stage.

Tho' they said at the School of Acting she was lovely as Peer Gynt

I'm afraid on the whole an ingenue role

Would emphasize her squint.

At the end of his routine, the sounds of an old phonograph replace Ross's voice; the piano slides backward on tracks, and the facade lifts to reveal the faded but elegant studio that is the set throughout the play. When Ross steps out from the piano, he is Fred, butler to theatrical legend Gary Essendine.

Starring in the role of Essendine is Frank Langella, who has received just encomiums for his exuberant performance. Langella plays the aging playboy with superb petulance. From the moment when he slinks down the set's curving staircase in his pajamas, at the beginning of act 1, he shares each exaggerated gesture - each exasperated sigh, each preen, each tantrum - as a sort of in-joke with the audience.

Absurdly theatrical, as it is meant to be, the performance forms the axis around which this marvelously choreographed show revolves. Clever, idiosyncratic directorial touches make the Coward script even funnier: the morose and Essendine-obsessed young writer Roland Maule (Tim Hopper) pads into act 2 wearing a ridiculous set of gaiters, and as the studio fills up he moves a chair to the top of the staircase in order to have a better view of the social bloodletting. At the beginning of act 3, empty wine bottles posed along the steps of this same staircase let us know just how rough a time Essendine has been having.

Sterling professionalism shines in each aspect of the production: in the set, which is cluttered just enough to keep it interesting, in the jaunty performances of the supporting actors, and in the atmospheric lighting design by Brian Mac Devitt, which features a stunning representation of daylight streaming through a window. Ross and his piano glide to the front of the stage at the end of each act, to provide music during the intermissions and prolong the mood of indulgence.

Theater this entertaining does seem a luxury, and Noel Coward knew it. "The theater of the future is the theater of ideas," he has Maule say to Essendine in a particularly priggish moment. "All you do with your talent is to wear dressing-gowns and make witty remarks when you might be really helping people, making them think!" Present Laughter doesn't make you think very hard, but sometimes theater is just an illusion, and to some illusions it is worth succumbing.

Celia Wren is a frequent contributor to Commonweal.