Edition: U.S. / Global

THEATER REVIEW; How Aged These Sonnets, but They Doth Speak Fresh

Published: June 23, 1998

The squiggly little things keep multiplying like amoebas. They grow, they shrink, they change forms, they disappear, they come back, they attack their creators.

Words, words, words! You can't say one without meaning an infinity of others. And if you're one inordinately well-read, hopelessly conflicted analysand named Hendryk, who could only be the product of the inordinately well-read playwright named Tony Kushner, you can't open your mouth without a swarm of the little varmints filling the room, endlessly trailing paradoxes and associations. Why, just consider the title of the brief, deliciously convoluted play in which this victim of logorrhea appears: ''Terminating, or Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein, or Ambivalence.''

''Terminating,'' as it will henceforth considerately be called, is one of seven brisk theatrical odes being performed by the Acting Company at the Joseph Papp Public Theater under the title ''Love's Fire.'' Mr. Kushner is in august company: the evening's other contributors are Eric Bogosian, Ntozake Shange, Marsha Norman, William Finn, Wendy Wasserstein and John Guare, each of whom was commissioned by the Acting Company to write a playlet inspired by a different Shakespearean sonnet.

Hold on, now. What exactly do Hendryk's babblings about sex and smells and curtain fabrics and tattoos and existential despair have to do with Shakespeare's Sonnet 75, the one that begins, ''So are you to my thoughts as food to life''?

Well, the poem is definitely, on one level, about ambivalence, and Hendryk, played with megawatt electricity by Stephen DeRosa, has enough of that trait to take Hamlet through another five acts of vacillation. So, for that matter, does his shrink, Esther (the winning Erika Rolfsrud), who would rather be pondering her own problems than listening to this cosmic kvetcher.

But even more resonantly, ''Terminating'' has everything to do with the limits and limitlessness of language. Which is also, of course, the essence of Shakespeare, in whose world a rose is seldom only just a rose. (Roses, by the way, figure in Hendryk's discussion of his distaste for a certain sex act, but don't ask how.) Mr. Kushner's spirited dialogue between doctor and patient, with the voices of their lovers thrown in as condiments, turns psychiatric free association into a floating metaphor for the transforming perspective every reader brings to every piece of literature.

''Love's Fire,'' which has been directed with ingenuity and great good humor by Mark Lamos, lets you crawl into seven very different minds dealing with similar material. The resulting production, which has already toured the United States and been seen at the Barbican Center in London, is a testament to the inexhaustibility of these poems -- a reminder that while the Shakespearean sonnet may be a tight and disciplined form, its life doesn't stop with its concluding couplet.

''The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living,'' W. H. Auden wrote in his elegy for W. B. Yeats. Few words have been so rigorously subjected to so much analysis over the centuries as those of Shakespeare's sonnets, which have been presented as everything from a narrative of homosexual love to the ultimate semiotic game. ''Love's Fire,'' in addition to using the poems as a sort of Rorschach test for its different playwrights, acknowledges the interpretive Tower of Babel that the works have given rise to.

Mr. Lamos appropriately begins the evening with the nine members of the ensemble uttering fragments from the sonnets under consideration, in a manner that starts slowly and seductively and then builds into a cacophony of clashing voices. The idea of a multiplicity of points of view is underscored throughout the evening in having each sonnet recited by two different actors, and in the designer Michael Yeargan's use of a wall of television screens to echo and fragment the faces of the actors and the words they speak.

The evening concludes with Mr. Guare's ''General of Hot Desire'' (spun off from the last of the sonnets, 153 and 154), which presents the entire ensemble as a group of college students, armed with essays and reference books, who have been assigned the task of creating a play from those same poems. What they come up with is nothing less than a history of the world, starting with the Garden of Eden.

''Hot Desire'' is a doggedly whimsical work, sometimes irritating in its cuteness but often truly affecting, too. In its scope and story-theater symbolism, it is reminiscent of Thornton Wilder's ''Skin of Our Teeth'' (this summer's first offering, by the way, from the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park).

Like that play, it sees something admirable and pathetic in humankind's attempts to reconnect, through art and religions, with paradise lost and an indifferent God, and it sums up the generosity of spirit of the whole evening. Its climactic, festive song, with music by the gifted Adam Guettel, is filled with an intense love of performing that lingers long after the students have lapsed back into academic quibbling over their project.

The other plays, Mr. Kushner's combustible rant of a work aside, are most interesting as exercises in individual styles, reflecting the distinctive mind-sets of their creators. Ms. Norman, the author of the harrowing '' 'Night, Mother,'' creates a dark daisy chain of erotic desire in her ''La Ronde''-ish ''Sonnet 140.'' Ms. Wasserstein, the master of the urbane comedy of manners, uses Sonnet 94 as a springboard for a look at worldly dissatisfaction among the rich and name-dropping in ''Waiting for Philip Glass,'' which brings to mind her screenplay for ''The Object of My Affection.''

In a lovely, palate-cleansing musical vignette, Mr. Finn, the composer of ''Falsettos'' and the current ''New Brain,'' has a painter (Mr. DeRosa) consider the impossibility of capturing his beloved (Jason Alan Carvell) in art. Mr. Bogosian, best known for his funny, splenetic performance pieces, turns a confrontation between a couple (Heather Robison and Daniel Pearce) on the eve of their wedding into a robust comic look at the sexually divided self.

And Ms. Shange, the author of the poetic portrait of black womanhood ''For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf,'' takes off from the musical tropes of Sonnet 128 into a conflicted mating dance to Chico Freeman's music, performed by Mr. Carvell and the incandescent Lisa Tharps and choreographed by Dyane Harvey.

The actors -- who also include Hamish Linklater, James Farmer and Jennifer Rohn -- aren't all equally comfortable with the extremely varied demands of the material, and there are occasionally feelings of the pained self-consciousness of an acting class. But they all have shining moments. Ms. Rohn, for example, is hilarious as a woebegone Eve looking for words for depression in Mr. Guare's piece. And Mr. DeRosa, in particular, has the bright presence and dexterous shading of which stars are made.

The evening's writers are, to some degree, stars already. ''Love's Fire'' isn't going to make or break them. But how wonderful to have them assembled, in all their differences, as they are here. The sheer exhilaration of Mr. Kushner's emotionally weighted wordplay is alone enough to make the production worthwhile. But it's the contrasts within ''Love's Fire'' that give it such a hopeful glow. They demonstrate that poems spun four centuries ago continue to evolve and mutate in ''the guts of the living'' and may well do so forever. That is something to celebrate.

Fresh Numbers by Seven American Playwrights

One-act plays inspired by Shakespeare's sonnets, by Eric Bogosian, William Finn, John Guare, Tony Kushner, Marsha Norman, Ntozake Shange and Wendy Wasserstein; directed by Mark Lamos; original music by Mr. Finn, Chico Freeman and Adam Guettel; sets by Michael Yeargan; costumes by Candice Donnelly; lighting by Robert Wierzel; sound by John Gromada; choreography by Dyane Harvey; dramaturge, Anne Cattaneo; voice and speech consultant, Elizabeth Smith; production supervisor, Maureen F. Gibson; production stage manager, Jennifer Rae Moore. Produced in association with Ira Pittelman and Jonathan C. Herzog. Presented by the Acting Company, Margot Harley, producing director. At the Joseph Papp Public Theater, Newman Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, East Village.

WITH: Jason Alan Carvell, Stephen DeRosa, James Farmer, Hamish Linklater, Daniel Pearce, Heather Robison, Jennifer Rohn, Erika Rolfsrud and Lisa Tharps.

Photo: Stephen DeRosa, left, Erika Rolfsrud and Hamish Linklater in a playlet by Tony Kushner. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)(pg. E1); Heather Robison and Daniel Pearce in Eric Bogosian's ''Bitter Sauce,'' part of ''Love's Fire.'' (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)(pg. E3)