City Desk: All the World's a . . .

(A small theater on W. 42nd Street, in NEW YORK CITY. Time: early evening, early summer, early 21st century. The theaters of Broadway, given over to spectacle-hungry suburbanites and gay aficionados of musicals, are several blocks, and quantum levels of success, away. We are in the shadow of the Port Authority bus terminal, among the small venues sustained by public subsidy and cheap production values, where dreams and talents are tried out: Broadway's back offices, television's sweatshops, the Bangalore outsourcing of Hollywood. Tonight's performance is a reading of a new play.

THE STAGE has all the accoutrements of the theater of beggary. It is a small, obviously subdivided space, whose ceiling, walls, and floor are all painted a dead black. Seven or eight black metal spots hang from the ceiling, providing the light. A few large black boxes, either for storage or to suggest furniture, sit stacked and ignored in a corner; they will not be touched. An air-conditioner is set in the back wall; it rumbles like a crop- duster, and so must be turned off as soon as the action begins. Other outside sounds come through quite clearly however: stomping feet from the room above (dance practice? sexual harassment?); bass lines amped by the sound systems of SUVs on the street; a flushing toilet.

THE SEATS are raked at a steep incline. They look cannibalized and recycled, as if they had migrated here after some Broadway renovation. (With luck, the play will make the same journey in reverse.) They are tightly packed and a little unsteady; sitting in them is more comfortable than flying coach, less comfortable than a commuter train.

For THE LOBBY, there is nothing but the offices of the little theater company that is hosting tonight's event. Cheap phones, a poster or two. Even so, there is a table set with cheese, wine, and plastic cups. For every premiere, however simple, there must be communion. This is my work: take, eat. As the room fills, we see THE PLAYWRIGHT, a young middle-aged man, forty or thereabouts. He will always be youthful; now he is beginning to show wiriness. In T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, he looks like half the people on the subway -- perhaps because half the people on the subway in New York are playwrights. He is friendly and intelligent, but a bit nervous, with reason: In a few moments he will take his seat in the front row, and watch his thoughts be drop-kicked from ACTORS to AUDIENCE.

THE AUDIENCE, which numbers about twenty, soon fills the little space almost to capacity. Most of them look much like THE PLAYWRIGHT, with here or there a tweak of race or sex; a FRIEND from an earlier period of THE PLAYWRIGHT's life, who is not a theater person, is conspicuous in brown-and-white spectators, as if he had expected a photographer. He sits by THE PLAYWRIGHT's AUNT and MOTHER. Family solidarity, the glue of drama, from Oedipus to the Tyrones. THE PLAYWRIGHT and his family are Jewish; what will New York do for entertainment, besides charity balls and ...