We hear them before we see them, as the moans and shouts of sexual ecstasy give the darkness an electric charge. Then the lights creep up just enough to let us watch the wild, athletic finish to one heckuva first date. Still, if Johnny has anything to say about it -- and he will, because ''garrulous'' doesn't begin to describe him -- this magical, romantic, destined-to-be night isn't about endings. It's all about a redemptive, connective beginning.

Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, a 1987 Off-Broadway hit that launched a real-life couple when Stanley Tucci and Edie Falco did it on Broadway last season, has just opened as the fittingly hot summer show at GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel. Plays don't get ratings, but if this one did it would be an R, thanks to full nudity and frank sexual talk.

What can get lost in all the focus on that hot, hot, hot stuff is how funny McNally's play is. And there lies the genius in director Joseph Adler's seemingly surprising decision to cast performer-playwright Avi Hoffman -- yes, the man who brought you Too Jewish? and Too Jewish Two! -- as Johnny, an Italian short-order cook and diehard romantic.

Playing opposite real-life wife Laura Turnbull, Hoffman brings a comic actor's buoyancy, warmth and deft timing to Johnny's yearning campaign for connection. It helps that he doesn't look like a muscled stud, just an ordinary man with a little less hair and a little more belly than (to borrow Johnny's description) a ''not young, not old'' single guy would wish he had. When he's sitting in Frankie's bed, wearing her sunglasses, just the edge of the sheet giving him a touch of post-coital modesty, Hoffman's Johnny gives off a cuddly, nonthreatening vibe, naked though he may be.

The slender Turnbull has a tougher time and bigger challenge in playing Frankie, the waitress who grants Johnny physical intimacy while keeping her more tender emotions locked up tight. Once the sex is finished, ravenous Frankie wants nothing more than a meatloaf sandwich and Johnny's immediate departure. But this Shakespeare-spouting kook, this co-worker who wants to push lust into a lifetime commitment, refuses to vanish.

Frankie is understandably frustrated at not being able to reclaim her own place, a one-room apartment in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen (the Spartan late-'80s space designed by Tim Connelly) from this incipient stalker. At her first performance, Turnbull was so unrelentingly brittle, so sparing in allowing glimpses of a battle-scarred woman's vulnerability, that it's tough to fathom why Johnny doesn't just give up on cranky Frankie. Hopefully, Turnbull, a fine actress, will find all the colors in Frankie's palette and paint a richer portrait as the play's run goes on.

Lest they be shocked, Hoffman's many loyal local fans need to know what's in store should they decide to sample a different side of his talents: full frontal nudity, sometimes under blazing stage lights; raunchy language; a flash of Frankie seated on the toilet.

Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune is a tricky dramatic duet, comic in its colors, blunt in its yearning and the push-pull of its adult characters. Once Turnbull hits all of Frankie's notes, McNally's ode to possibility should flow with the grace of the Claude Debussy piece conjured by the title.

Fuente: The Miami Herald
Septiembre - 2003