Woe-ho-ho Laughing Wild is strange and admirable BY CAROLYN CLAY

In Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, two strangers meet at the "Threshold of Revelation," invading each other’s drug-induced dreams. Something similar happens in Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild — except that here the mystical threshold is in the aisle of a Manhattan grocery and there are tacks and a banana peel on it. In this accumulatively wacko riff on modern urban alienation, an unhinged if articulate woman has assaulted a depressed but struggling man by the tuna-fish display. Following monologues by both characters, the two find themselves wafting in and out of quirky, cartoon-violent dreams in which they clash until an embryo of empathy is formed. It’s like a desperate wish washing up from a curiously comic stream of consciousness.

Durang’s crazy, poignant 1987 comedy is being revived by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Calderwood Pavilion (through June 26) with artistic director Nicholas Martin at the helm and the playwright as half the cast. The other half is Tony- and Emmy-winning Debra Monk, giving a performance of compulsively gabby desperation in which an ambient hostility and Margaret Hamiltonian cackle share a leaking mental boat with allusions to Beckett — whose line "laughing wild amid severest woe," appropriated by Happy Days’ Winnie from Thomas Gray, supplies the play’s title. (The piece also acknowledges Beckett’s short play Breath, each part of the triptych ending in the calming, life-sustaining in-and-out of respiration.)

Full of pop-cultural flotsam and jetsam, Laughing Wild is moored to its time. Yet in its funny-sad conjuration of the free-floating angst of the unconnected city dweller, it transcends the late ’80s. Sally Jessy Raphaël, with her trademark red glasses, may no longer be the center of the television zeitgeist, but post–September 11 the anxiety of the average New Yorker is, if anything, elevated. It isn’t as if the Catholic Church or the Christian right had turned on the spigots of compassion when it comes to AIDS or homosexuality. And such resorts as new-age crystals and the hoped-for summer-of-’87 realignment of Mankind with Mother Earth known as the Harmonic Convergence seem less balm than balmy.

Yes, Laughing Wild is strange, more a series of screeds than a savage farce like Betty’s Summer Vacation or the heartbreakingly hilarious The Marriage of Bette and Boo. Durang wrote the Woman’s rant, titled "Laughing Wild," in a bad mood and without self-editing. And with its crank attacks on everything from people who talk in movie theaters to Mother Teresa and Dr. Ruth, the speech sometimes smacks more of Andy Rooney on crack than of Beckett on laughing gas. But the speaker, who admits she’s seen the inside of a mental institution and lists Bleak House as her favorite book (she likes the title), is tragic in the sense that she’s unable to let human need trump her intolerance and aggression. And Monk, at once commandeering and beseeching the audience, makes her hilariously abrupt and unreasonable, yet pitiable.

"There is no assuagement of longing," observes the Man when he takes the stage for "Seeking Wild," a folksy talk — complete with note cards — on his efforts to escape the carapace of a "negative person." Still looking cherubic, if silver-haired, at 56, Durang sloughs depression from his face as if exfoliating. More hopeful, if quizzical, than mad, the Man, for 20 years "a pretty good ad-hoc existentialist," is seeking meaning. And God, alas, does not cut the mustard.

The loopiest and most bravura part of Laughing Wild is the post-intermission "Dreaming Wild," which begins with varying re-enactments of the characters’ unpleasantness over the tuna fish and proceeds to interweave their nocturnal imaginings, with the Woman dreaming she’s murdered and usurped Raphaël and the Man dreaming he’s obscure Catholic icon the Infant of Prague — looking like Marie Antoinette in an Imperial Margarine crown — being interviewed on her show. You know you’re in Durang country now, though Beckett’s just across the border.