theater

"I'm having a busy year!" Christopher Durang tells me -- and as usual, the playwright who is famous for truth-telling is on-the-money. In mid-November, his new play, Miss Witherspoon, will arrive at New York's Playwrights Horizons. Meanwhile, Durang is in Philadelphia, readying his second world premiere of the season, Adrift in Macao, for Philadelphia Theatre Company.

Macao is a musical (the composer is Durang's friend, Peter Melnick), and a genre parody. It's the film noir-ish story of five characters set spinning in a moody, glamorous locale (think Casablanca), and it's a homecoming of sorts for Durang. In the 1970s, his A History of the American Film became a cult favorite. Film, which involved a group of film archetypes (the Bette Davis type, the Henry Fonda type) wandering through much of the 20th century, was resolutely uncategorizable -- a song-filled romp one moment, a Pirandellian dark comedy the next.It was an introduction to a truly original voice.

I ask Durang what we should expect from Macao. "It makes a fair amount of reference -- especially in ambience -- to the noir world of the 1940s," he says. "But it's lighthearted. I'm more drawn to the smoky nightclub aspects of noir than to the crime stuff.."

And what about the noir characters? "Of course, there are mysterious men and women. In so many of the noir films, there are women nightclub singers, performing in smoky clubs. There's an old movie actually called Macao, with Robert Mitchum, where Jane Russell plays a nightclub singer. I like the idea of a woman in an exotic place, with all the possibilities. Peter wrote a song for the show, called "In a Foreign City in a Slinky Dress.'"

And his hopes for Macao's future, when it's so expensive to produce a musical? "Well, this is a small musical -- five characters, plus a "trenchcoat chorus' of two. I'd love it if it moves on! The show is good fun. That's how I see it, anyway. I hope audiences will, too."

Adrift in Macao, through Nov. 20, $31-$49, Philadelphia Theatre Company, Plays & Players Theater, 1714 Delancey St., 215-985-0420.