John Patrick Shanley has directed yet another of his many plays, Where's My Money? Not, alas, where his mouth is; the money, or pay dirt, or masterwork still eludes him. Shanley is one of our most frustrating playwrights and screenwriters: Though he is a natural-born dramatist, his biggest hit was a film, Moonstruck (which, however, doesn't mean that he is not responsible for some deservedly obscure movies -- anyone remember Five Corners?). To put it succinctly, Shanley has seldom written anything wholly devoid of interest or totally on the mark. The difficult final stage of his journey, from spotty to spot-on, has yet to be traversed.

Although Where's My Money? has a carefully excogitated circular structure, whereby its beginning manages to bite its tail, its way of getting there is haphazard and halting, its often windy dialogue a poor antimacassar for its spindly furnishings. To the extent it is about anything, it concerns the precariousness of male-female relationships, whether marital or extramarital, and even when -- if I read it correctly -- one partner is already six feet under.

This brings me to the play's most opportunistic aspect: ghosts, of which it has one male, one female. Now, ghosts are, along with angels, the most annoying gimmicks of our hapless era. They were tolerable in olden days, when meant to give pleasurable goose bumps, like a bracingly cold shower. But current ghosts, like the equally sappy angels, are meant to entertain and sustain us -- to be something no self-respecting classical ghosts would have had truck with: feel-good ghosts, reassuring us about an eleemosynary hereafter we can spend helping survivors we loved find their earthly salvation. To Shanley's credit, his ghosts are still scary -- but, unlike those of, say, Banquo and Hamlet Sr., they have minimal moral function.

In Where’s My Money?, a divorce lawyer says of his wife, "She’s a bag of shit, and I have to hold my nose to fuck her." The cruel insult received a huge laugh in its original production Off-Off Broadway, but after moving to the Manhattan Theatre Club, the harsh line drew uncomfortable gasps. What happened? One reason might be that while the downtown hipsters understood this tightly organized shocker’s tongue-in-cheek language, MTC’s denizens took the midlife crises Shanley’s professionals far too seriously. Viewed unironically, this dark comedy just seems mean-spirited. It’s like if you moved Don Rickles out of the nightclub and booked him a show opening for John Tesh.

Some might argue that a good show is a good show, and it will appeal to anyone. But theater, more so than TV or movies, depends on a healthy relationship between performers and crowd – especially when it comes to comedy. If the audience isn’t involved, the actors notice and the whole experience changes. This must be the case with Shanley’s tentative, out-of-sorts production, which once zipped by on all cylinders, but now looks to be motoring in the wrong lane.

From the first series of horror-movie poses, Shanley’s modern ghost story revels in its on cheesiness. The plot concerns tow battling couples who are haunted by their past. Like a thriller, every scene ends with a shock. The overheated performers do everything but wink at the audience when delivering carefully crafted one-liners, the best of which have a Borscht Belt snap: "Monogamy is like a 40-watt bulb – it works but it’s not enough."

November 8, 2001

WHERE'S MY MONEY? Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley. With David Deblinger, Yetta Ann Gottesman, Erik Laray Harvey, Florencia Lozano, Chris McGarry, Paula Pizzi. Set by Michelle Malavet, costumes by Mimi O'Donnell, lights by Sarah Sidman, sound by Eric DeArmon. Manhattan Theatre Club Stage II, 131 W. 55th St. between Sixth and Seventh avenues. Seen at Saturday afternoon's preview.

WHEN THE Labyrinth Theater Company produced the cheeky and surprising "Where's My Money?" in July, writer-director John Patrick Shanley made it clear that the play was a work in progress. Since then, his work on the play has indeed progressed, and now Manhattan Theatre Club presents "Where's My Money?" - a noirish melodrama that's also a ghost story about love - in a production that opened last night.

This staging of "Where's My Money?" is a nearly identical remounting, with almost every actor and designer involved in the earlier production moving to MTC along with the play. That's both a good thing and a bad thing: Much of what was good about the play is now better, but some of the problems of the earlier production still haven't been solved.

Though Shanley's rewrites aren't major, for the most part they're effective. The story remains a loose-limbed rondo that dances with issues of trust, stability, love and money. It still doesn't quite overcome its occasionally sitcom-simple, battle-of-the- sexes psychology, but now Shanley's major thematic concerns are traced with new clarity. And the playwright handles the formerly maudlin final scene with a lighter touch that's far more satisfying than it was in the earlier draft.

Many of the performances, too, have grown more full-bodied as the actors revisit the roles they played over the summer. Yetta Ann Gottesman, sweetly affecting as the romantic idealist whose penchant for S and M gets the narrative ball rolling, has deepened the fierce need for self-definition that complicates her character's girlishness. The territorial skirmish between David Deblinger, playing a lawyer with a secret link to Gottesman's character, and Florencia Lozano, as the lawyer's wife, now has a lived-in sense of screaming exaggeration that makes the scene a hilarious highlight.

Deblinger's funny-scary dervish of misogyny is now the powerhouse of the show, mainly because the emotionally explosive John Ortiz is no longer part of the ensemble. In the only cast change from the Labyrinth production, Ortiz has been replaced by Erik Laray Harvey in the role of another lawyer with his own marital woes. Harvey is more physically imposing than Ortiz, and that's used to good effect, but he has a wobbly sense of his character's arc that makes his performance less than convincing.

Shanley once again directs his own script, and once again, you sometimes wish he hadn't. As a director, he's certainly competent, but there's a tonal jitteriness to the show that could probably be smoothed over by a director with a better eye for the big picture.

*A playwright as savvy as John Patrick Shanley knows that mayhem, misogyny, suicide and sado-masochistic love are not enough to satisfy sophisticated New York theatergoers.

A Tease Grows in Brooklyn: Vetta Gottesman and Paula Pizzi star in John Patrick Shanley's 'Where's My Money'.

The package can work only if you add a little humor. He has done just that in his loonily entertaining "Where's My Money?" It's an update on Schnitzler's "La Ronde" set in darkest Brooklyn.

In the Viennese version, we watch a series of people sleeping with other people until all of society is involved and indicted.

Here it's not just about sleeping together. It's about humiliating and threatening one another. Relationships are seen as games of "chicken," sometimes with mortal consequences.

That two of the characters are divorce lawyers (or matrimonial attorneys) adds to the uproariousness of the proceedings.

At one point the two are chatting. "I don't think of manhood as a job," one says. "It's a job. Done right, it's a tiring job," the other replies, going into a brilliant speech on the creative and destructive faces of Woman.

Shanley is a playwright given to wild risks, and he has a cast that can take his gamey dialogue and give it all the pungency it deserves.

The standout is David Deblinger, who, as the belligerent lawyer at the nexus of all the plot points, has the juiciest material, which he delivers with all the bravura of great comic arias.

Florencia Lozano, his antagonistic, materialistic wife, handles her antipathetic role with great aplomb. Yetta Ann Gottesman is surprisingly appealing as the lawyer's doormat mistress, and Paula Pizzi is very funny as her closest friend. Erik Laray Harvey plays a friend in the middle of all the turmoil with enormous grace.

November 8, 2001 -- 'WHERE'S the play?" one might ask John Patrick Shanley after seeing his "Where's My Money?" This production at the Manhattan Theatre Club, which Shanley also directed, remains as puzzling as when presented earlier this year at the Labyrinth. Three women - a crippled masochist, a haunted neurotic and a frustrated housewife - struggle to find their footing in a world prone to invasion by the dead.