THE LAUGHING CURE.(Last Easter)(White Chocolate)(Theater Review)

In "The Four Quartets," T. S. Eliot, who was not renowned for spontaneous displays of humor, explained a lot about comedy. "Human kind cannot bear very much reality," he wrote. Jokes are the soul's analgesic: they defy gravity--which is to say, anything that weighs us down--and they detach us from grief. When we say that laughter "lifts our spirits," we mean that it works as a sort of stage-managed resurrection--we are somehow taken out of ourselves, and carried back into the moment. In that instant, life becomes luminous again.

This process is part of the strategy and the argument of Bryony Lavery's deft and compelling "Last Easter" (at the Lucille Lortel). The play begins with a joke, disguised as explanation to the audience: "We're trying to cheer each other up because . . . O.K. . . . June . . . the bitch . . . June's had breast cancer," a swishy, "deeply shallow" singer and female impersonator called Gash (the superb Jeffrey Carlson), who specializes in high camp, says of the play's central character, a dying lighting designer (Veanne Cox). Lavery's play "Frozen" was nominated for a Tony Award last year, but the playwright got into trouble for failing to acknowledge her borrowings. Here she is more scrupulous about listing the eclectic sources from which she has filched her fun: Bill Clinton, the Daily Mirror, and the late English jokemeister Bob Monkhouse, among others. Although Lavery's jokes may not be original, the use to which she puts them is. She writes in short strokes of overlapping observation--an impressionistic narrative style that relies on timing and intonation and requires a special alertness from the generally excellent ensemble. Under the director Doug Hughes's confident hand, exhilaration and desperation play off each other in scintillating counterpoint. "This sick tired bald twig thing in a polystyrene wig you can't even laugh at," Gash calls June, to their mutual friend Leah (the droll Clea Lewis), a propmaker. "She said you could laugh at it!" Leah replies. "Permission!" Gash says. "How's that fun?"

Transgression is the name of the comedy game; in "Last Easter," humor seduces the audience into facing the unpalatable issues of death, euthanasia, and the miraculous. We are smug about life; the little miracles of touch, taste, breath, movement are taken for granted, until, inevitably, as June says, "shit happens." For a brief moment at the beginning of the play, before the doctors pronounce her inoperable, June glimpses life's blessing. She sits looking at the red tulips on her kitchen table and smoking a cigarette--"It's her extreme sport," Gash says--and she feels happy. "The happiness is something to do with . . . the air, the sun, the everything," she says. But, once her diagnosis is known, she uses the word "miracle" only ironically: when praising the promiscuous Gash's ability to find company or describing her own terminal condition. As expertly played by Cox, June is a stoic intelligence, who is increasingly wrapped in the solitude of her sorrow. When Gash and Leah hatch a plan to take her to Lourdes for a religious cure, she remarks, "They're going to take me to Lourdes and I'm to be miraculously cured of secondary cancer from which no one recovers, by a phenomenon celebrated by a religion I don't believe in without my knowing it." Nonetheless, she goes along.

For the trip, the trio is joined by a raucous fourth miracle worker, a bibulous actress named Joy (Florencia Lozano), who is haunted by the suicide of her former lover. Lavery has made her own trip to Lourdes, and she reports back entertainingly--on the shrine's loudspeakers, which hush the public (with the exception, evidently, of the Italians); the toilets marked "Femmes Malades" and "Hommes Malades"; the photographs of "the Cured." But the laughter in these scenes only magnifies the friends' own fervent longing. They keep debunking the folly of the Lourdes faithful around them--"Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you . . . if you're . . . if you believe," Gash sings--but each clearly harbors his own small hope. ("They all want a miracle, but it's each person's secret," the stage directions tell us.) As the friends push June's wheelchair out into the center of ...