'Bal Masque' Curdles The Creme de la Creme

At Theater J, a New Take on the Very Rich

As a social event, it was nonpareil. As the subject of a play, it's not quite so dazzling a bauble. Still, in "Bal Masque," playwright Richard Greenberg manages to add amusing colors to his comic reconstruction of the hours after Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, the celebrated fete to end all fetes.

The play, receiving its world premiere at Theater J, allows six strong actors the opportunity to romp in the manicured gardens of Greenberg's lush locutions. It has been staged with agility by John Vreeke, who sets a playful tone for his skilled performers. All in all, though, black and white comes out a little gray. Alternating between satire and pathos, the play never settles on a particularly urgent arc, and most of Greenberg's characters remain, as a result, rather sketchy. The curiosities about them only intermittently pique ours.

With his debut Broadway play "Eastern Standard" in 1989, Greenberg was dubbed a wunderkind; lately, the wunder has been his productivity. "Bal Masque" is one of three new works the 48-year-old playwright is unveiling this season, and on top of these, Julia Roberts is opening on Broadway next week in a revival of his 1997 drama "Three Days of Rain." Washington audiences, meanwhile, got a taste last summer of Greenberg at maximum throttle with Studio Theatre's mounting of "Take Me Out," his lyrical oath of allegiance to baseball.

Theater J deserves a hand just for shepherding this original play to the stage. Its artistic director, Ari Roth, is confidently building the company's reputation as a haven for first looks. And even if "Bal Masque" is a less elegant entertainment than "Take Me Out," the piece is still flavored with Greenberg's wit. Its inspiration is the legendary Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel, thrown in the fall of 1966 in honor of Katharine Graham. To have received a coveted invitation, in those days when Capote reigned as a fey object of glibness and an exotic kind of fascination, was to have had, in rarefied circles, one's right to a heartbeat validated.

The play unfolds in the wee hours after the ball, in the apartments of three couples who attended. They're examples of the types who reputedly adored or were adored by Capote. Though the diminutive writer never appears, he's a presence in the play, invoked by all the characters, especially two women who profess to be among his "Swans," the holiest of holies in the hierarchy of Capote confidants.

Greenberg has these women clinging tenaciously to their status: "I was the model for Hol --" one of them starts to say before catching herself, in a reference to Holly Golightly, heroine of Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's." (It must be noted that it is questionable whether the discreet muses of Capote's acquaintance would ever have broadcast such a claim so gauchely.) The moment, though, captures the essence of "Bal Masque," a play that is at heart about America's enduring fascination with the rich. What's it like to live the soign é Manhattan life? The truth, Greenberg tells us, is that after hours, it's just as sad and lonely and tawdry as life for everybody else. The rich just have more stuff.

In one apartment, a settled older couple (Jeff Allin and Brigid Cleary), feeling as if they've been blown aside in the social whirlwind, wrestle testily with obsolescence and lethargy. In another, an abstract painter (Cameron McNary) goes home with a young socialite (Maia DeSanti), each trying to determine how useful the other will be in furthering their aspirations. In the third are the wallflower spouses (Colleen Delany and Todd Scofield) of the couple in the second apartment, dancing on the edge of a dalliance.

The play, as its title and subject suggest, is also about unmasking, about the realities that reveal themselves after revelry dies down. By the final blackout of "Bal Masque," uncomfortable truths will have emerged and distasteful secrets been confessed. But Greenberg's emotionally opaque narrative doesn't allow us to come to any intimate understanding of these people, and so the revelations have no cumulative impact. What does pay off with more frequency is the drollery of the repartee. The play is sprinkled with Greenberg's signature wit; it's not a put-down to say that "Bal Masque" sometimes plays like a high-end version of Neil Simon's "Plaza Suite."

The well-chosen actors do manage to seem as if they are creatures of the exorbitant canyons of the Upper East Side. Scofield, for example, is wonderfully on the money as a millionaire from Indiana who's never strayed from Midwestern plain and direct. After he tells Delany's Joanna that his Fifth Avenue apartment has 13 rooms and she asks if they're small, he replies matter-of-factly: "Three of them are small." It's guilelessness that makes the line work. DeSanti is beguiling as a young social piranha with a wild speech impediment that can milk a phrase such as "fwail, fwivowous cweature" for laughs. Delany, too, offers a memorable turn as DeSanti's polar opposite, a meek thing who's, nevertheless, transgressed in a most deplorable way.

As the older swells, Allin and Cleary are even sweller. A Cowardesque cloud of bitter irony envelops them as they pick apart the ball and disclose -- more in the words they avoid than in those they choose -- the state of their union. Dying for a smoke, they conspire to steal cigarettes from the room of the sleeping maid, and even after their mission is accomplished, they can't come up with a match. The fire in this relationship is most definitely out.

Daniel Conway contributes a functional yet striking set, with revolving panels that evoke each of the apartments, and costume designer Kathleen Geldard dresses the women chicly and sleekly. A recording of Philip Glass's "Glass Pieces" is an urbane bit of embroidery, too. Although Vreeke and the cast at Theater J have revealed the play in some satisfying ways, what still may be in need of some refinement are the ways in which Greenberg's characters reveal themselves.

Bal Masque , by Richard Greenberg. Directed by John Vreeke. Sets and lighting, Daniel Conway; costumes, Kathleen Geldard; sound, Matt Rowe. About two hours. Through May 21 at Theater J, Goldman Theater at DC Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th St. NW. Call 800-494-TIXS or visit http://www.theaterj.org/ .