SHADOWBOXING.(Theater Review)

"Straight male seeks Bush supporter for fair, physical fight," someone wrote in a widely distributed Web-site posting last week. But onstage the fight for an alternative vision of America is beginning not with a show of force but with a show of imagination. For instance, Whoopi Goldberg, playing a self-confessed male "dope fiend" named Fontaine--one of five characters she channels in her one-woman show (at the Lyceum)--spends about twenty minutes meditating on the state of the nation. "I'm not fuckin' wit' ya. I'm just preppin' you for the future," Fontaine says of "morality issues." He asks, "Are you now or have you ever been a homosexual?" adding, "If you don't want gay people to get married, don't marry one." Goldberg, like many comedians, has faith in her comic witness and its power to create a seismic disturbance. "I devised a way to keep it light, so I can keep my eyes open," Goldberg says, through Fontaine, launching into the Police's "Every Breath You Take." "Every move you make, every claim you stake, I'll be watching you--George!" she says, and exits.

By contrast, Sam Shepard, in his apocalyptic cartoon "The God of Hell" (well directed by Lou Jacob, at the Actors Studio Drama School Theatre), goes beyond the headlines in order to transform his rage at the nation's fear-induced turn to the right into a vision of spiritual contamination. Here, a school bell that a Wisconsin farmer's wife uses to call her taciturn husband in from his herd of dairy cows becomes, in the course of the play, an alarm bell that rings not just for him but for us.

Of all the contemporary American playwrights, Shepard has the deepest connection to the romance of the land, and a sense of the sin that comes with it. Although "The God of Hell" begins ordinarily, with the faux naturalism of a wood-beamed house in which a farmer, Frank (Randy Quaid), is oiling his boots, and his wife, Emma (J. Smith-Cameron), is watering her plants, the style and content of the story turn by degrees into the grotesque--a fierce distortion that is a measure of the author's fear and loathing. "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures," Flannery O'Connor said of the grotesque. Shepard's startling theatrical figure is Welch (Tim Roth), a perky, well-dressed agent of officialdom who arrives to interrupt the banality of rural daily life. Welch, whose name carries overtones of default and evasion, is anarchy in the guise of the acceptable: he wears a suit and an American-flag lapel pin and seems to owe his historical origins to John Ashcroft and his literary paternity to Joe Orton's demented Detective Truscott, in "Loot." ("You're at liberty to answer your own doorbell, Miss. That is how we tell whether or not we live in a free society," he says.) Welch's calling card--waved through the door before he enters--is a cookie in the shape of an American flag. As he questions Emma about the house and who is staying there, Roth, full of thrusting movement and flashing a smile of big, bright, predatory teeth, makes a terrifying show of chauvinistic bonhomie. He notices, for instance, a flagpole without a flag. "I'm not in Bulgaria or Turkistan or somewhere lost in the Balkans," he says. "You'd think there would be a flag up or something to that effect. Some sign. Some indication of loyalty and pride." He adds, "We could be anywhere." He offers to sell Emma all manner of patriotic bric-a-brac from his briefcase, including a red-white-and-blue bullhorn and a recording of Pat Boone singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Emma, who is given to exclamations like "jiminy" and "criminy," is the voice of homespun American good sense. Welch won't take no for an answer to the question of whether anyone is staying in her basement. "Swear on a stack of Bibles?" he asks. Emma says, matter-of-factly, "I don't have to," and her reply sends him packing.

But, of course, there is someone in the basement, whom Emma is waiting to meet, and for whom she is fixing breakfast. Haynes (Frank Wood), a mysterious school friend of her husband's, who ...