The Herbal Bed.

In The Herbal Bed, Peter Whelan's ponderous drama about morality and Shakespeare's daughter, a serving girl collapses from vertigo in Worcester Cathedral. And who can blame her? She is about to commit perjury in diocesan court. And when she looks up at the building's soaring heights, she thinks she sees God the Judge.

The play asks us to view the incident as a tinge of historical color: It is the summer of 1613, when Shakespeare was dying, when cathedrals were skyscrapers, and people were not embarrassed to talk about God. With its self-conscious gravity, the moment is typical of The Herbal Bed, a thoughtful but entirely humorless work that guttered briefly on Broadway this spring, before indifference snuffed it out.

How high is Worcester Cathedral? How closely does any society hold its faith? The Herbal Bed - like another recent Broadway offering, David Henry Hwang's Golden Child - uses religious belief as a measuring rod to gauge its characters' alienation from the culture that surrounds them.

The Herbal Bed, which had a successful run in England before its luckless journey westward, is based on a historical event: a lawsuit brought, and won, by Susanna Shakespeare Hall against an acquaintance who had publicly accused her of adultery. Letting the Bard lurk behind the scenes, a ghostly, invisible presence, Whelan fleshes out this anecdote to ask a solemn question: Does duty to one's conscience outweigh a duty to others?

Guilty in intent but not in fact, the spirited Susanna (Laila Robins) struggles to persuade her tortured, deeply religious lover Rafe Smith (Armand Schultz) to lie, committing a small wrong for the sake of a greater good. At stake is the career of her husband, the brilliant physician John Hall (Tuck Milligan) who wages war against disease using the plants in his garden - the eponymous herbal bed.

In the New York production (directed, as in London, by Michael Attenborough) the garden's rainforest-green leaves clustered thick as kudzu around a pavilion's wooden frame, providing an ironically sylvan setting for the skirmishes and illicit meetings of Act I. (The set was designed by David Jenkins.) As if taking their cue from rampant vegetation, tropes of sickness and healing proliferate through the script.

Should we see illness as a punishment from God, wonders the amiable, puttering Bishop of Worcester (Herb Foster)? Or should we, rather, focus on God's curative powers: the garden as a "demonstration of his strength"? The sinister Vicar General (Simon Jones), a zealous Puritan (who in the Broadway production looked like an oversized chess piece, with a lace ruff in choke hold round his neck) would rather ignore the body's welfare altogether; presiding as grand inquisitor over the Act II trial, he harangues Susanna on the century's spiritual sickness: "the moral void of our times - the retreat from grace."

Such interplay of metaphor and idea might make The Herbal Bed a powerful meditation on the nature of spiritual health. Instead, the play remains a hodgepodge of none-too-subtle images welded to abstraction - like a John Donne poem gone wrong. Whelan's thematic lattice cannot support the emotion piled on it. The intense passions of otherwise inscrutable characters, expressed in hyperventilating rhetoric, are often ludicrous, as when Susanna, dressed in her nightgown, falls to her knees in the garden, comparing the stars to "a thousand eyes."

Susanna herself should provide the key to the entire drama. Her courageous, compassionate vision of the universe ("Hate is the sin, not love?) provides the play's ultimate healing force. Through Susanna, Whelan has given the work a definite feminist slant. "Honesty is not one thing!" his heroine cries, seeing complexity where the male establishment has ordained the stark duality of truth and falsehood.

But which is the real Susanna - the selfless physician's assistant, cleaning vials with vinegar, or the accomplished liar? As realized by the glamorous Robins, whose every word might have been filtered through Harvey's Bristol Cream, Susanna often appeared downright shifty. And as a result, her conviction that "love's kingdom has its own laws" seemed simply an expression of rebellion against a society that kept her from being a doctor in her own right.

Whelan is just as cagey when it comes to the other characters' beliefs. Rare Smith and John Hall are apparently die-hard Puritans. But - unless we count Smith's self-recriminations after bowing to the Bishop - we never learn what faith means to either of these men. And while Jones gave the production's best performance as the steely-eyed Vicar, the character remained a cartoon villain, a foil for the improbably visionary Susanna.

The play alludes frequently to the conflicts of the Reformation. But the religious conflicts in The Herbal Bed are designed for appearance only, like an artificial Romantic garden shaped, through painstaking labor, to seem the work of nature.

Like Whelan's play, Golden Child depicts the anguish people feel when forced to choose between conflicting values. And Hwang (best known as the author of M. Butterfly) also works thwarted love, grudges, and low-key intrigue into a historical setting: in this case, Southeast China in 1918-1919.

Andrew Kwong (Randall Duk Kim) maintains an uneasy connubial equilibrium with three women: the formidable First Wife (Tsai Chin), an aging opium addict with a wry sense of humor; the duplicitous, resentful Second Wife (Kim Miyori); and the gentle Third Wife (Ming-Na Wen), Kwong's true love. Veiling insults in courtesy, the women vie for Kwong's attention in and around their compound's three golden pagodas (Tony Straiges designed the elegantly simple set).

But the days of traditionalism are over. Kwong's travels have introduced him to Verdi, cuckoo clocks, waffle irons, and other Western ways, including Christianity - a religion that, to his mind, has one salient advantage: monogamy. As his overtures to a jovial Anglican missionary (John Horton) make Kwong's intention to convert - and choose just one spouse - increasingly plain, the wives revolt, scheme, plead, and Westernize in varying degrees; the household spirals toward tragedy.

Golden Child underwhelmed critics when it originally opened in 1996, and, though since rewritten, remains seriously flawed (although it did win three Tony nominations, including one for best play). The production, directed by James Lapine, features some shrewd character portraits - Chin's majestic, wisecracking First Wife, in particular - but it suffers from Hwang's insistence on vocalizing the subtext. The play never hints at truths when it can wallop the audience over the head with them. In case we are too dense to understand the central theme, for example, First Wife intones: "When change comes, it comes like fire - no one knows who will live and who will be lost."

But the flame of change, burning through the household, does not entirely destroy the old truths. Kwong invites disaster when he forces his wives to accept baptism and stop offering ceremonial gifts to their ancestors. But the clumsily staged scenes that frame the body of the play put a hokey, optimistic spin on things. To the clash of Peking opera cymbals, the wizened ghost of Kwong's fundamentalist Christian daughter (Julyana Soelistyo) appears to her agnostic son (a role doubled by Kim), and persuades him of the importance of family. Respect for the past, once a form of ancestor worship, has become a source of secular identity in an inconstant universe.

The fire of change is a transforming fire, Golden Child suggests. The Herbal Bed, by projecting the forces of change onto the personality of an inspired idealist, suggests the same. Were the Golden Child more subtle with its meaning, and The Herbal Bed more honest with its characters, the phoenix might struggle up more convincingly from the ashes.