Indianapolis ­ Flat City's three established resident theaters, The Phoenix (20-plus seasons), Indiana Repertory Theater (IRT) (30-plus seasons) and Theatre on the Square (TOTS) (17 seasons) have been warming up these cold January nights with comedy. At the Phoenix, Artistic Director Bryan Fonseca concentrates on local and regional premieres of material that are fascinating and often challenging, both as theater and as literature. Through Jan. 30, it's Michael McKeever's splendid Running With Scissors. Improbable as this is going to sound, it's a comedy about Lou Gerhig's disease, and it is all at once thoughtful, heartening and wickedly funny. Two blocks away from The Phoenix, also in the heart of Indy's Mass. Ave. arts-and-eats district, TOTS has just closed The Big Bang or Free Food and Frontal Nudity, a three-man musical that was as artfully accomplished in presentation as it was winsomely silly in content. Down at IRT, which is housed in a splendidly reclaimed '20s movie palace on Washington Street, the fare runs to sumptuous productions of somewhat more mainstream material. Through Jan. 29, it's a chic production of Charles Busch's recent Broadway success, The Tale of the Allergist's Wife.

Of these three, the most theatrically notable is Running with Scissors. At mid-life Charlie (Charles Goad) learns he is doomed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the painfully wasting disease that claimed baseball great Lou Gerhig and inherited his name. There are some palliative measures but not as yet a cure. Charlie may have 18 months to live, the last of them probably in agony. Curtain up finds him racing away from his doom and dictating his life story while verbally sparring with an anything but shadowy specter named Wally Death (Rich Komenich). For all his well-bellied, flame-shirted palpability, Wally is, in fact, the essence of Charlie's death. Playwright McKeever gave Wally the play's most stinging gallows humor, and Komenich's offhand manner makes him explosively, knowingly droll.

In his headlong flight from fate, Charlie charges off across a desert wasteland that is real, deeply symbolic and, as designed by James Gross, numbingly ugly. Car trouble fetches him up at a down-at-the-heels motel run by Nell (Deborah Sargent). (The interior set is far more attractive.) Nailed down as she is by a failing business and a dying father-in-law, Nell's fate is in no greater shape than Charlie's, though she has excited the stammering romantic intentions of truck-driving Travis (Ronnie Johnstone).

Nell also excites Charlie's unwilling, even frightened interest. He is, after all, dying. How attractive can he be as a romantic prospect, he wonders? Enter Kiki (Tiffany Shoemaker) in valentine red costuming, carrying a white cane. She's all shoulder-shaking, eye-bugging attitude and, being the embodiment of love, naturally she's blind. Just as naturally, this being a zany allegory, only Charlie can see or hear Kiki and Wally as they spar over him -- Wally trying to talk him into cashing out early to avoid the pain and Kiki counseling him to embrace his 18 months (not to mention Nell) and pack his last days to overflowing with joy.

Being it's a comedy you can work out for yourself who prevails.

The brief production (100 minutes with intermission) moves along effortlessly, guided with director Fonseca's usual easy grace -- emphasizing the wit, focusing the affirmation that undergirds the story, pointing the jokes without hammering them or letting them get the better of the plot's momentum, keeping the romance sentient but avoiding cloying sentiment.

At the heart of it all is Goad's splendidly balanced characterization of a man at an unwelcome crossroads -- slammed but resilient, brave without bravado, angry without accusatory resentment, self-aware without self-pity. He made much of a lesser role in Take Me Out last season at The Phoenix and sails in this one. Cincinnati audiences will get a chance to see his work in an upcoming role at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

Next up at The Phoenix will be Claudia (Dirty Blond) Shear's one-woman comedy, Blown Sideways Through Life, about holding 60 some jobs before age 30. The show (Feb. 3-27) will inaugurate the theater's newly renovated Underground, which has been transformed into an intimate cabaret space complete with a liquor license. Liquids and munchies will be offered during performances. In March The Phoenix will tackle a controversial Byrony Lavery drama about pedophilia and murder, Frozen. (Info at phoneixtheatre.org or 317-635-7529.)

The Big Bang
Dr. and Mrs. Sidney Lipbalm are touring Israel but have loaned their New York apartment to playwrights Boyd Graham (R. Brian Noffke) and Jed Feuer (Nick Carpenter) as venue for an investors' audition of songs and scenes from their new 12-1/2 hour musical, The Big Bang. They hope to raise the $83.5 million it will take to mount a Broadway production and are presenting highlights from the book and score -- with the two of them, backed by pianist-keyboardist-music director Albert (Ray Lahrman), representing a cast of several hundred and describing the elaborate staging and spectacular effects.

Audience members, attending as potential backers of the show, soon learn that in its hundreds of scenes and numbers, The Big Bang will cover the entire history of the world. One song, for example, explains how Adam and Eve agree to live in the Garden of Eden on the divine promise of Free Food and Frontal Nudity. Act Ten, we're told, will begin with a "rage solo" by Mamie Eisenhower. There will be, as Boyd and Jed demonstrate for us, wars, famines, pestilence, crusades and crimes. Empires east and west will rise and fall -- all portrayed in scintillating song, energized dance and dizzying production numbers. Then comes the moving and deeply philosophic eleven o'clock blockbuster, Today Is Just Yesterday's Tomorrow. The boys are so certain it will be the show's big, breakout hit that they sing it twice -- first in show tune style and then pop style.

Two things made this delicious silliness work and work very, very well. No, three.

First, there was the clearly underscored certainty that the material does not take itself seriously. Not did the TOTS production. It's piffle. It knows it's piffle, and they worked hard at making the piffle slick. That was mostly the work of director-designer-choreographer Ron Spencer. He was the second element in the show's success. A musical comedy veteran before he founded TOTS, Spencer staged and choreographed the piece with a touch as light as the frothy material. The third element was the wide-eyed innocence, maniacal glee and deft precision with which Noffke and Carpenter tackled the material. These dudes were deadly serious about their silly songs and sillier concept, which is the only way to play it -- as believers in a cause.

After all, the slickest piffle come from the most serious pifflers. Too bad it's closed. TOTS often revisits successes. Perhaps they'll revive this one down the road.

Next up at TOTS is an ultra-brief run (Jan. 28-Feb. 6) of Adam Fisch's Sunflower and Blue. A young painter caught in a creative draught seeks inspiration in the works and life of Van Gogh but risks falling into the madness that turned Van Gogh suicidal. After that (Feb. 11-26), TOTS is presenting an unlikely, autobiographical comedy called A Letter from Ethel Kennedy by the late Christopher Gorman. In Act One a television executive who is dying of AIDS lunches first with his alcoholic mother and encounters her flat denial of his condition. In Act Two he lunches with his hypercritical father. In Act Three the son has died and his mother, now struggling with her addiction, lunches with her son's ex-lover. The New York Times called it "an old-fashioned, comfort food comedy." (Information: tots.org or 317-685-8687.)

And At IRT
Playwright Charles Busch was a sometime player with off-off-Broadway legend Charles Ludlum's Ridiculous Theatre Company and, later, author of his own off-off-Broadway legend -- the antic, cross-dressing, gender-bending, up-sending Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which ran for over five years in a milieu where five weeks is a long run. After some other, somewhat lesser successes in a similar genre (including the play and movie, Beach Blanket Psycho, which has been running recently on one of the HBO channels), Busch set his sights on Broadway and penned The Tale of the Allergists' Wife, with zero cross-dressing, a hint of sexual experimentation and only the most positive sort of up-sending.

IRT's moxie Megan McKinney described the play as "Neil Simon with an edge." It was nominated for three Tony Awards in 2001, including best new play, and ran over two years.

Marjorie Taub's psychiatrist has died and Marjorie (Marilyn Pasekoff) has descended into the enervating depths of black depression. She won't dress. She won't go out. Her recently retired allergist husband, Dr. Ira Taub (Joe Muzikar), has moved on into a satisfying post-career career in volunteer work. Her mother, Frieda (Elaine Hyman) is worried in that shtick Jewish mother way. Even the doorman at their up-market, Manhattan apartment building, Mohammed (Andrew Navarro) is deeply concerned. Then, suddenly and mysteriously, a childhood friend, Lee (Cary Barker) erupts into Marjorie's life with tales of her involvement in the great world of the great. She knows everybody who's anybody, drops all their famous names, goes everywhere that's anywhere and is constantly doing grand things in grand places in the only the grandest of manners.

Or so she says.

Marjorie believes her and, caught up in the coattails of Lee's whirlwind, charges out of her depression and back into life. She's out and about at openings and lectures and movies and restaurants. And all the while Lee is insinuating herself as a sort of permanent houseguest. After that the relationship between the two women sours and Lee departs, ordered away, leaving behind a stronger Marjorie and a stronger family.

Based on rave reviews of the Broadway and subsequent productions, Allergists' Wife is a stronger, funnier comedy than IRT is presenting. At the performance viewed, there was laughter, but it wasn't continuous and it wasn't the riotous reception reviews have indicated. The why of that, I think, is the pitch director James Still (IRT's playwright in residence) instilled into the performers. Too much of it, except when the revolting mother is onstage spouting about suppositories and constipation and other bowel events, is just too nice and too calm. It lacks anger in the family relationships and angst in Pasekoff's performance of Marjorie's depression. There's no frenzy. No spit. No spite.

And while Barker's dervish performance spins with energy and sparks with style, it's all too clear early on that Lee is a fraud abroad on a major con. There's no foundation of evil or pain. She sparks renewal in Marjorie, but if there's a cost to her, it remains out of view.

Sprawling the proceedings out on Russell Metheny's cavernous set doesn't help matters. Nor do the pauses before the blackouts that end the scenes. Nor does the harridan on the howl performance by Hyman that makes Estelle Getty's excesses on TV's Golden Girls seem like a study in restraint.

Next up at IRT will be a production for school audiences of A Woman Called Truth, with only a few public performances on the theater's fourth-floor Upper Stage (Saturdays, Jan. 29 through April 6). Next up on the mainstage will be John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (Feb. 16-March. 12). (Information: indianarep.com or 317-635-5252.)