STEAK AND CAKE.("The Butter and Egg Man"; "Our Lady of 121st Street")

In an illustrious dramatic career that spanned four decades, George S. Kaufman wrote with Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Morrie Ryskind, Ring Lardner, and Moss Hart. Of his forty-five plays, forty-four were collaborations. (Kaufman explained his obsessive co-authorship as a case of "gelt by association.") "The Butter and Egg Man," which was written in 1925 and is being revived at the Atlantic Theatre Company, was Kaufman's only solo theatrical effort, and it taught him a valuable lesson: comedy needs company. As competitive as he was witty, Kaufman required the alchemy of contest to call out both his acerbity and his invention.

The hero of "The Butter and Egg Man," a starstruck hayseed and soi-disant sugar daddy named Peter Jones (the genial David Turner), is hustled out of twenty thousand dollars by two rapacious, penniless Broadway producers only to beat them at their own game. When he's stonewalled at the first post-production meeting of what is a bona-fide disaster, Jones literally pays to play. He buys the seasoned producers out, then fast-talks a vacant and voluminous assistant hotel manager, Oscar Fritchie (the delightful John Ellison Conlee), into investing. "I mean--even if it isn't awfully good. That isn't supposed to matter so much in New York, is it?" Jones says. And so it would seem. Somewhere between Acts I and II, Jones turns the theatrical turkey into a golden goose. And, with a plagiarism suit waiting in the wings, he unloads his hit at a profit that goes to prove, I guess, the old Broadway adage: hero today, gonif tomorrow.

The twists of Kaufman's plot have all the right cynical particulars, but he doesn't properly factor them out. How is it, for instance, that the two producers, who don't have a sou between them at the beginning of the play, can each come up with fifty thousand dollars at the finale to buy back the rights? How do the tyro producer and the secretary who is sweet on him manage to achieve the impossible by rewriting the show? In order to keep the wacky comic logic spiralling ever higher, the mature Kaufman would have addressed these implausibilities; the jejune Kaufman overlooked them. Although this bit of flimflam is swift and crowd-pleasing (well directed by David Pittu, with a droll set by Anna Louizos), there's something unsatisfying at its core. It's a smart cookie that doesn't quite rise. The plot doesn't snap; the wisecracks don't crackle; the tempo doesn't pop.

If "The Butter and Egg Man" 's buoyancy illustrates the bedrock optimism of the twenties by making the most improbable dream--money and goodness--come true, the drama of lamentation and longing acted out in Stephen Adly Guirgis's "Our Lady of 121st Street" (at the LAByrinth Theatre Company) speaks gorgeously to our own deracinated times. This play, which tells the story of a group of fractured souls who congregate at the Ortiz Funeral Home in Harlem for a wake that turns into a vigil--when the deceased nun they're mourning, Sister Rose, is stolen from her casket--is predicated on the conviction that dreams are something you wake up from. In fact, Guirgis's brilliantly drawn characters, most of whom were taught by Sister Rose as children and haven't met in years, have been so punished by life and so exhausted by grievance that they are way past dreaming. They are numb to others and to themselves, resigned both to entropy and to absence, which they manifest in sensational ways.

Like the stolen corpse, the characters' sense of loss is a fact of life that is both their tragedy and their own doing. An alcoholic detective, Balthazar, has lost a child; a d.j. named Rooftop has lost the love of his life, Inez; a building superintendent, Edwin, is lumbered with his subnormal brother, Pinky, who is all loss; and Father Lux lost his legs in Korea and his faith on 121st Street. In one terrific scene, the brokenhearted but feisty Inez (the scintillating Portia) turns her agitation on a passive, mousy white girl, Sonia (superbly played by Melissa Feldman), who sits almost unnoticed in a corner for most of the play. Inez asks ...