BLOOD UNDER THE BRIDGE.(Some Girl(s))(Theater review)

"I've got a little list--I've got a little list," Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner in "The Mikado," sings. "Of society offenders who might well be underground." To the annals of perverse theatrical list-makers we must now add Guy, the successful thirty-something writer in Neil LaBute's "Some Girl(s)" (well directed by Jo Bonney at the Lucille Lortel). Guy (Eric McCormack) has an outrageous little list of his own, a list of emotional, rather than political, subversives: the badly treated ex-girlfriends with whom he is apparently compelled to make amends before embarking on his marriage, to a twenty-two-year-old nursing student. "Do a check-in, you know?" he explains to Tyler, the friskiest and most thick-skinned of his old flames. "Get caught up to date with 'em, make sure that we are, you know: no harm, no foul." In Guy's eyes, the junket is an act of good faith, a "little bit of windmill tilting." From where the audience sits, however, it gradually becomes a spectacular exhibition of bad faith. We pose the same questions as Guy's former girlfriends: Why now? What is this really about? As it turns out, despite his protestations of good will and the gush of his bonhomie, Guy is toxic. No contemporary American playwright is more brilliant than LaBute at dramatizing mankind's passion for ignorance. "Some Girl(s)" is yet another astute demonstration of his uncanny ability to draw pure water from the most poisoned of wells.

The disingenuous escapade plays out in a series of four look-alike hotel rooms; the cities vary, but the similarity of the spaces is meant to emphasize Guy's psychological predicament--he is everywhere and nowhere. He is stuck. McCormack's Guy is eager and earnest. Unlike David Schwimmer, who played the part in London last year, McCormack doesn't exude a sort of adorable and distracting impishness--his body language isn't the same ironic-comic semaphore of ambivalence. Nonetheless, he is sufficiently winning to make Guy's psychology engaging and his shucking credible.

Guy, who is the author of a story called "The Calculus of Desire," doesn't know what he wants. He is chronically fickle. His romantic life is a never-ending tale of betrayal. In his first encounter, with his provincial high-school sweetheart, Sam (the excellent Brooke Smith), now a housewife, he wonders whether they should share some overpriced cashews from the hotel minibar. "You decide," she says. "Which was never one of your strong suits." In adulthood, you choose, and you lose; maturity brings with it the courage to accept that loss and your part in it. Guy's history of bolting from his relationships without so much as a farewell marks him as a perpetual adolescent. Even though he pays occasional lip service to his bad behavior--"Wow. I suck," he says at one point--he cannot really keep hold of a negative opinion of himself. When he meets Bobbi (Maura Tierney, of "ER," making her New York stage debut), a doctor whom he dated for three years before taking up with Tyler, he confesses, "I'd phone you, but then I'd chicken out. I didn't want you to not like me." Bobbi replies, "But you didn't really want me to like you, though, either. True?" Guy wants everything all the time, a state of affairs that his mission of reconciliation and flirtation only underscores. Guy finds it hard to confess his new marital status or even to get his tongue around the concept of commitment. "I've kind of taken this vow-thing here, and I need to stick to it," he tells the brazen Tyler (the appealing Judy Reyes), an artist who has no problem with the idea of extracurricular nooky.

The title of the play refers to Guy's defensive description of his fiancee ("Some girl is all"); the parenthesis extends that brutal detachment to women in general. In the name of making things right with his former lovers, Guy says some annihilating things: Sam learns that, even at eighteen, he felt that she was not on his level ("You ended up almost exactly like I figured you would"); Tyler is made to see that she possessed ...