Undignified Death

Like most things these days, executions ain't what they used to be. No longer are the condemned paraded to their gibbets with drums and cheers. No longer, in the moments before the hangman pulls the lever or the ax man strikes, do the damned plead ignorance or spit defiance or sob-story the mob to tears, as did priest and forger William Dodd, executed in 1777, just before — in the phrase of historian Lucy Moore — he "with a stiff neck and a wet pair of breeches" swung out to meet his maker.

In short, modern death, like modern life, has had all the theater lanced from it.

Or so presumes Lettice Douffet, the execution-obsessed one-woman repertory company at the center of Peter Shaffer's clever comedy Lettice and Lovage. When we meet her, Lettice is a tour guide at what she considers the dullest historical manor in England. She can't resist embellishments — or tips — and soon she's performing, belting tall tales to tourists from her own imagined proscenium thrust. Even her vocabulary lessons strain credulity. After using the word inured, she tells her tour group that it describes something that's been dipped in gold — a usage foreign to dictionaries but perfectly appropriate to Lettice, who gilds dull fact with fictional glitter.

Unfortunately, for much of the first act, her fantasy annoys. As played by Jeanne Averill, Lettice can be shrill, piercing and a chore to keep up with. With her shock of red curls, pajamalike outfits, elocutionist's diction and honey-glazed hamminess, she's a vision of too much. She builds single words into epics. A full octave separates the ro and the mance of romance; later, she chirps, "That is strict and absolute fact!" with more than a second lapsing between the sharp c and the half-spat t.

The effect is like reading a long, all-capped e-mail from the Bewitched character Endora.

In an extended opening sequence, we see the concluding moments of four of Lettice's tours. Each time, her stories and performances are wilder (and less believable). This necessitates three costume changes in the first 15 minutes, which is no way to start a show. Worse, she declaims such bullshit in her extravagant little arias, it's impossible to believe that anyone could take her seriously. But her listeners do, nodding and applauding in that too-eager way of the choruses in musicals. By the fourth tour, it's as if she's playing to a packed Arrowhead, her every r buzzing out like a pretentious bumblebee. I felt pummeled in my seat.

But Averill's Lettice grows on us, especially as she develops an unlikely friendship with Lotte Schoen (Kathy Kane), the subdued bureaucrat who must discipline Lettice for her tale-spinning. Primly suited and bobbed beyond reason, the uptight Lotte is slowly loosened by Lettice, and Lettice is calmed a bit — she shrieks less and reveals an admirable dedication to those truths she considers worthwhile. She only invents, we learn, when history is dull enough to need it.

As Lettice and Lotte grow close and the show grows tender, we discover that their yin-and-yang personalities are rooted in common alienation: the weary, flat and stale modern world. Lettice wants to dress this gray world up in colors; Lotte is too depressed by it to do anything but occasionally dream of its destruction.

The second and third acts touch and amuse, but they also wear on too long. For almost three hours, Averill and Kane shade and shape their characters, with Kane finding affecting notes in Lotte's slow buildup to excitement and Averill ultimately richening Lettice enough that her outbursts are almost forgiven.

Almost.

More than most, the play engages issues that are on the mind of its audience. In the long, woozy second act at the heart of the show, Lettice and Lotte down Edwardian grog and bemoan the drabness of modern life and architecture compared with the pageantry of history. When Lotte argues that the true destruction of London had less to do with the Blitz than it did with developers, it's hard not to think of the fate soon to befall the space we're sitting in — a skylighted garage that the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre has transformed into the homiest stage in town. Now the MET has lost the building, and the space is just months away from becoming a store peddling office furniture. That makes this show (the last here) and its fulminations feel like something bigger: The MET is preening atop the gallows, offering a filibuster against the death of the beautiful, the impractical, the theatrical.