Culture comedy The Sisters Rosensweig, Permanent Whole Life BY CAROLYN CLAY

At least Chekhov’s Prozorov girls can agree on Moscow. Among the three sibs of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig (presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through December 4), Pfeni wants to flee to Tajikistan, Gorgeous to Harrods, and Sara as far away from her Jewish-American roots as she can get. Wasserstein’s Tony-nominated 1992 comedy places the three women in an upscale London dwelling — done up in David Korins’s design like a cross between a minty Versailles and a Victorian valentine — where they have convened in the summer of 1991 (as the Soviet Union is crumbling) to celebrate twice-divorced banker Sara’s 54th birthday as well as to acknowledge the recent loss of their mother.

The departed Rita Rosensweig didn’t bake; neither was she a cookie cutter when it came to popping out daughters. Repressed Sara is the London-dwelling Jewish-American president of the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Europe. Effusive middle sister Gorgeous is a Newton housewife, mother, and radio talk-show host. And the baby, 40-year-old Pfeni, is a travel writer looking for herself in various wrong places. Wasserstein herself describes Gorgeous, Pfeni, and Sara respectively as "a practicing Jew, a wandering Jew, and a self-loathing Jew." And she categorizes the play as "a well-made boulevard comedy," which is self-depreciating but essentially correct. Three Sisters The Sisters Rosensweig is not — though it shares with Chekhov’s masterpiece (which it quotes on a couple of occasions) a sense of good people questing toward something on which they can’t quite put an other than geographic label. At the Huntington, where the play is helmed by artistic director Nicholas Martin, that comes across, along with the wisecracking Wasserstein wit and undercurrents of affection, familiarity, tension, and heartbreak.

The occasion of the birthday draws together an assortment of characters: Sara’s teenage daughter Tess (named for Hardy’s novel), who, feeling "irrelevant" as a white European female, is set to follow Tom, her working-class boyfriend of Lithuanian descent, to that Baltic country to aid in the post-Soviet struggle; a suave former Thatcher MP whom Sara dates; the bisexual musical-theater director with whom Pfeni is contemplating marriage and children; a widowed New York furrier who happens on the scene and, as if squirted by Oberon’s magic flower, falls doggedly if charmingly for Sara. Some of their interactions are believable, others are not, but Martin’s lavish, lived-in production almost always is — whether figure-conscious Gorgeous is hiding the mixed nuts from herself or Tess and Tom are huddled on the stair watching Sara dance with the furrier like kids ogling Mama kissing Santa Claus. And if Wasserstein’s joking gets in the way of the unsettledness and struggle for identity she means to convey (as it does not in The Heidi Chronicles), the actors fold palpable ache into their Thames-washed Borscht Belt mishegas.

The Huntington revival took shape as a vehicle for another collaboration between director Martin and the sublime comic actress Andrea Martin, with whom he had worked on Betty’s Summer Vacation and The Rose Tattoo. She had to withdraw, but Gorgeous’s ill-fated $400 shoes are well filled by petite dynamo Deborah Offner, whose perfectly accessorized Hadassah matron sparkles like the rhinestone brooch on her Chanel-knockoff suit. An adept physical comedienne, she can be staggered or throw a snit on a dime. Maureen Anderman is a soignée yet vulnerable Sara, and Mimi Lieber folds sadness, irony, and sexiness into Wasserstein stand-in Pfeni. T. Scott Cunningham is flamboyant but not swishy as Pfeni’s theatrical inamorato, Geoffrey. And Jeremiah Kissel makes furrier (specializing in "synthetic animal covering") Mervyn Kant a confident rather than cliché’d Semitic-centric mensch. All are abetted by Robert Morgan’s witty, character-augmenting costumes.

The Sisters Rosensweig is a warm Jewish puppy next to Zayd Dohrn’s nipping greyhound, Permanent Whole Life (at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through November 20). BU-minted MA in playwriting Dohrn is best known for the historically based political drama Haymarket. But this new black comedy about unprincipled life-insurance salesmen in Palm Beach is a whole different animal. What Glengarry Glen Ross did for sleazy real-estate hawkers dueling for steak knives and blood, Dohrn does for his purveyors of "permanent whole life" annuities they don’t plan to honor. "You are confused, Henry," sexagenarian insurance entrepreneur Mort Goldman tells his seeming blank slate of an assistant. "You’re laboring under the misapprehension that what we do here is pay life-insurance claims, which we do not. What we do here is we collect life insurance premiums, and we settle lawsuits." (Bet you an American-buffalo nickel you can identify those rhythms.)

As portrayed by Ken Baltin in Wesley Savick’s snappy world-premiere production, funeral chaser Mort is a crude, lanky, avaricious bear of a man, his amiable growl friendlier than his bite, his big paws continually in someone else’s personal space as he offers his sympathetically lying shmooze, his lips a-smack as he enjoys a bit of cake in his profitable valley of the shadow under Florida skies. "Fucking paradise," he says of the Sunshine State. "This is where the whole country comes to die." Including, it turns out, him: a Hawaiian-shirted, gastronomically orgasmic diabetic committing hilarious suicide by Whitman’s Sampler.

But I get ahead of myself. We meet Mort and Henry (Gabriel Kuttner) in their natural habitat: a funeral home where, downstairs, lissome shiksa Susan Taylor (Stacy Fischer) is communing with the remains of her recently deceased husband, who was hit by a cement truck while driving home, and quite possibly driving into, her teenage niece. Bereaved yet beguiling, Susan makes a mournful picture. But Savick, aiming to out-dark Dohrn, makes it clear the marriage wasn’t perfect. Chainsmoking in her little black dress, Fischer’s Susan smashes out butt after butt in her husband’s coffin.

Unlike Mort, Henry does not revel in his job: the black suit in 150-degree heat, the fact that everyone he meets is "depressed or dead," the goal of screwing beneficiaries out of just deserts. But his wife, Ava (Lisa Morse), is pregnant, so he’s trapped. As for Mort, he wants to mentor his reluctant protégé, teach him the tricks, turn him into a human legacy. He also wants to make Henry the beneficiary, so he says, of his own half-million-dollar annuity. That is, until he promises it to the widow before comforting her right into bed while denying her claim. But as events unfold and primal fights over birth and death heat up, Mort turns out to be not the only sly fox in Dohrn’s clever, cynical gloss on Ben Jonson’s Volpone.

Savick’s production is nimble and deadpan, as befits the deliciously amoral material. Two-time Elliot Norton Award winner Richard Wadsworth Chambers comes up with a classical-boned tic-tac-toe board of a set, its latticed squares lit by Ryan Connealy to radiate by turns the white glow of a mausoleum and the pastel hues of Florida. Baltin’s anomalous Mort is a death-chasing life force, a fatherly shyster clown invoking the Holocaust out of one side of his mouth while squirting out of the other, with regard to an old woman hit by a safe: "We’re not paying two hundred fifty thousand dollars, Henry, some coupon cutter can’t get out of the way of a falling object." Kuttner’s Henry’s a stiff fish by comparison, but his eyes are watchful and he’s casting a few hooks of his own. Fischer’s enigmatic Susan turns a studied sad eye toward the bottom line, and Morse’s seemingly straightforward miscarrying mom turns out to have an inner Lady Macbeth who’s as breezy as the play’s beach-town setting. Permanent Whole Life is a sharp little dagger of a comedy displayed here in a stylish sheath.