American plays done on the Russian stage usually don't come off a whole lot better than Russian plays on the American stage. There are just too many chances for cheap caricatures and hackneyed stereotypes to butt in and bungle things up.


That makes the modest new production of Lanford Wilson's "Talley's Folly" at the Theater U Nikitskikh Vorot all the more enjoyable. It has no pretensions of depicting or analyzing America or Americans, wisely limiting its focus to the Pulitzer Prize-winning play's treatment of a mismatched love that apparently is strong enough to overcome its limitations.


Wilson's play actually peels back the surface decoration of the white American dream, revealing subtle subterranean conflicts between haves and have-nots, Jews and Gentiles, and in a late confessional moment for the suitor Matt Friedman, a refugee from Lithuania, it exposes the gaping gulf that separates America's buffered lifestyle from the cataclysmic European experience. That's all still there in the text, of course, but, as directed by the American Joshua Carter, it's handled almost solely as fodder for entertaining courtship complications.


The action takes place on a Fourth of July evening in 1944, in a boathouse near Lebanon, Missouri. Friedman (Sergei Desnitsky), a St. Louis accountant whose advanced age and Jewish heritage make him unacceptable to Sally Talley's wealthy, small-town family, is waiting there for a tryst with Sally (Yelena Kondratova), whom he hopes will accept the marriage proposal he plans to make.


The informality of the opening, with Desnitsky handing out cricket clackers to the spectators and giving instructions to the stage crew, sets the homespun tone for the performance, establishing its sense of intimacy and announcing, so to speak, that this courtship business itself is a rather theatrical undertaking that needs the proper planning and props.


Indeed, Michael Franklin-White's set and props ingeniously capture the wondrous spirit of romance. The boathouse is heavily cluttered with baskets, boats, crates, ropes, nets, floats, and a bird cage sporting a bouquet of flowers. Most everything is colored in dreamy, undersea tones, and any of the toy-like objects is capable at any minute of transforming into something else, such as when an old dinghy splits in two and traps Sally just as she runs out of patience and wants to make an exit.


That playful, childlike atmosphere -- clearly echoed in the actors' moods and mannerisms -- softens and, ultimately, conquers the obstacles that the outside world has set before these balking, uncertain, yet hopeful lovers.


To an extent, Sergei Desnitsky performs as if this were his own one-man show. Pouty, quick-witted and with a dry sense of humor, Desnitsky's Matt is capable of working up a wall of engaging bravado even though he knows he is anything but a perfect match. At age 44 he is over the hill and Sally's dad calls him "more dangerous than Roosevelt himself." But this lonely man, who never wants children because his own experience has proven that the world is too cruel, is pulling out all the stops and putting on charms he may not even have in order to catch his last chance at love.


Kondratova (Desnitsky's real-world wife) is perfectly content to play an acquiescent game of follow-the-leader. It robs her performance of some potential fireworks by significantly downgrading the magnitude of her duel with Matt, and undercutting the tragedy of her own situation: She, too, is an outcast, having once been rejected as a bride for her inability to have children. Still, with an ever-present sparkle in her eye, Kondratova's Sally is always quietly attractive.


"Talley's Folly" takes no chances, but it does well what its makers set out to do. It is a pleasant and endearing trip through the rocky first steps of love.





"Talley's Folly" (Prichudy Telli) plays Friday, Jan. 2, 16 and 31 at 7 P.M. at the Theater U Nikitskikh Vorot, 23/9 Bolshaya Nikitskaya. Tel. 202-8219/5600. Running time: 2 hours, 5 mins.