‘Collected Stories’: Can’t Put It Down

The Geffen Playhouse’s “Collected Stories” offers the sort of pleasure you don’t find often enough at the theater--any theater.

It’s a modest but thoroughly engrossing work by Donald Margulies, one of America’s sharpest playwrights. It’s “juicy” in an old-fashioned sense, a story of a literary friendship made and sorely tested, and in director Gilbert Cates’ production, there’s juice aplenty. Even if the play weren’t well-crafted, it’d be enough to have Linda Lavin and Samantha Mathis tearing into it as they do here.

In all his plays--”The Loman Family Picnic,” “Sight Unseen” and last year’s “Dinner With Friends” among them--Margulies is drawn to the moral gray areas that complicate already complicated lives. Moral outrage can turn even a highly skilled playwright--say, David Hare--into a finger-wagger and a blowhard. Too often in Hare’s plays the ethical dilemmas are made thuddingly clear in the first 10 minutes. By contrast a writer such as Margulies doesn’t mind ambiguity. “Collected Stories” may stack its deck more than the very best Margulies plays (I’d put “Sight Unseen” at the top). Yet on its own terms it’s a wonderful acting vehicle.

“Collected Stories” premiered three years ago at Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory, a frequent commissioner of Margulies. In the new Geffen production, Lavin plays Ruth Steiner, a fearsomely smart Grace Paley-style short story writer teaching literature at New York University. Mathis is Lisa Morrison, an ardent fan and student, who has come for a tutorial to Steiner’s Greenwich Village apartment (a gorgeous, honey-colored, bay-windowed creation in scenic designer John Arnone’s hands).

Ruth is surprised at the paradox she sees before her. Lisa’s a bit callow, a fawner on the cusp of ditz-dom, but on the basis of a short story she has written she considers her a genuine talent. Lisa becomes Ruth’s assistant and, with her mentor’s often harsh guidance, eventually publishes her first short story collection to much acclaim.

The follow-up is the problem. Friend to friend, Ruth tells Lisa about her affair with poet Delmore Schwartz in the late 1950s. A fictionalized version of that relationship turns up in Lisa’s novel. (Margulies was inspired indirectly by the real-life legal tangle involving novelist David Leavitt and author Stephen Spender, who accused Leavitt of ripping off his memoirs.) Ruth feels burglarized. She’s a victim of “All About Eve” syndrome, zoomed by her protegee.

Margulies knows full well he’s trafficking in Joseph L. Mankiewicz territory: At one point Ruth even refers to Thelma Ritter, a key wisecracking voice in “All About Eve.” Though he tries to balance his central argument, Margulies ultimately turns Lisa into a literary grave-robber.

What’s remarkable, though, is Margulies’ combination of head-to-head combat and artful indirection. He touches on a world of themes--loyalty, trust, cultural appropriation--without pumping up his two-hander into something it’s not. “Collected Stories” isn’t afraid to end scenes on the off beat, the minor key. Margulies allows his big confrontations to emerge naturally from the conversational flow. He has tact, in other words, and enough sense to brake at the edge of melodrama.

You find similarly admirable traits in Lavin and Mathis, both making their Los Angeles area stage debuts. Lavin’s training in, among other writers, Neil Simon (she won a Tony for “Broadway Bound”), serves her well here, make no mistake. Her comic instincts are supremely confident. Yet she can dispatch a line as simple as “This isn’t exactly a social call” with a deceptively warm smile that says far more than the line itself.

Mathis (“Broken Arrow,” “The American President”) manages artfully to capture the character’s early awkwardness, her transformative stages and the bittersweet end result. She errs a bit in making the Act 2 “reading” scene at the 92nd Street Y too actressy. But in extremely well-considered ways Mathis works against the increasing obviousness of her character.

I’m not sure how interested Margulies is in making Ruth a genuinely complex figure; in the end, she’s too much the wronged woman, at least as directed and played here. But Lavin and Mathis feast on their roles without dining out on them or the scenery. Actorly relish is no guarantee of audience enjoyment. What’s relish without anything underneath?

No such problem here. This edition of “Collected Stories” plays beautifully.

* “Collected Stories,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. (Plus 2 p.m. June 2.) Ends June 13. $30-$40; $10 student rush. (310) 208-5454. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Linda Lavin: Ruth Steiner

Samantha Mathis: Lisa Morrison

Written by Donald Margulies. Directed by Gilbert Cates. Set by John Arnone. Costumes by Holly Poe Durbin. Lighting by Jane Hall. Sound by Jon Gottlieb. Production stage manager Lynne M. Harris.