Man about town; In two new plays, Neil LaBute lets Eric McCormack show his inner heel and Richard Greenberg considers New York before the Crash, writes Adam Green.

Byline: Adam Green

Much like opening day at Yankee Stadium, the arrival of a new play (or two) by Neil LaBute, our native chronicler of bare-knuckle sexual politics, has become an annual New York tradition. After last season's wounding romance Fat Pig and nervous interracial love triangle This Is How It Goes, LaBute brings

us Some Girl(s), a spare, mordant comedy inspired by the comic craftsmanship of Neil Simon, the moral acuity of Eric Rohmer (to whom it is dedicated), and the emotional generosity of the Marquis de Sade.

Under the direction of the excellent Jo Bonney, Some Girl(s) stars Eric McCormack, fresh from the final season of Will & Grace, who brings his boyish charm and snappy timing to the stage for the first time since the 2001 revival of The Music Man. "There's a temptation, when you're trying to escape a sitcom character, to play the complete opposite-a Scandinavian pimp, say," McCormack says. "But this play is a man and a woman in a room-I've been doing that for eight years."

Actually, it's a man and four women (Maura Tierney, Fran Drescher, Brooke Smith, and Judy Reyes), and the man is not the bighearted girl's best friend that television audiences have come to love. Here, McCormack plays a

commitment-shy writer who, in the days before his upcoming wedding, travels across the country to meet with four ex-girlfriends he had abandoned. In a series of blandly identical hotel rooms, he tries to make things right-and pick up new material for his short stories. From LaBute's remorseless pen, the words "I'm sorry" emerge as two of the most selfish and destructive in the English language.

Some Girl(s) was a last-minute replacement at the Lucille Lortel Theater for LaBute's own Swallowing Bicycles, which will presumably turn up in New York next season, along with Wrecks, his one-man show starring Ed Harris, which is slated for the Public in the fall. "The truth is, I've always loved the process of writing," says LaBute, who is in the editing room with his latest film, a ...