KITSCHY CURIO

Each year, in the private fantasy that runs through my head during the Oscars-a fantasy exponentially more entertaining than what's usually transpiring on TV-the one constant is the list of those I'd thank in the unlikely event I ever hear my name called out and find myself sputtering, crying and preparing to thank Jesus from the podium. After professing gratitude to my agents, managers, astrologers, studio heads and the Academy, I'd thank my boyfriend, my parents and my fourth- and sixth-grade teachers.

The purpose wouldn't be Tom Hanks-ish-my teachers were both women and straight. I'd hate to spotlight them the way Hanks did poor, unsuspecting Rawley Farnsworth. I'd simply want to honor their special role in my formation as (I hope) a decent and creative human being.

In the first third of The Music Teacher, the play/opera at the Minetta Lane Theatre, it first seemed that Wallace Shawn (who wrote the resolutely ambiguous script) and Allen Shawn (who wrote the resolutely atonal score) wished to celebrate some teacher they once knew, emblemized by Mr. Smith (a glum Mark Blum).

Speaking from the present, Smith says that 30 years ago, while teaching at a "rather artistically inclined" boarding school, something colossal yet undefined caused him to flee to Europe, earn his doctorate, marry, have kids and ultimately, upon returning stateside, teach elsewhere.

Packaged into elegiac monologues, Smith's memories are leavened by those of Jane (an equally glum Kellie Overbey), formerly his star pupil, now grown. Moveable screens devised by director-designer Tom Cairns allow us to see many of the students as Smith remembers them: Nadine (Elisa Cordova), Angelique (Lauren Jelencovich), Janet (Kristin Knutson) and earnest Jim (Ross Benoliel). Their luminousness, Smith ruefully observes, is sweetly, stunningly sensual.

Jane's compositional gifts, too, were striking, and Smith recalls the opera he co-wrote with her, the performance of which comprises the second third of The Music Teacher. According to press materials, the brothers Shawn wrote the play/opera over 20 years ago, and the opera, an ersatz Greek tragedy about an adulterous love affair, is worthy of being locked in a drawer-that is, not discarded.

In the opera, Young Jane (Kathryn Skemp) plays a heroine at the vortex of a triangle with brawny Young Smith (Wayne Hobbs) on one side, brainy Jim on the other. As Smith remembers it, it is all you can imagine an opera co-written and performed by kids would be: stentorian voices, melodramatic poses and inane recitative. It also offers a much-needed glimpse into Smith's remembered life.

Yet because the opera is more a kitschy curio than a viable, stand-alone piece of theater, the first and third sections are needed to make this a play-or play/opera. Terrible idea: The adumbrative quality of the work's first third is mauled and mangled by the third, which finds Smith, following the performance of the opera, escaping to parts unknown and indulging in hedonistic trysts, starting with a flame-haired singer (beautiful-voiced Rebecca Robbins) and ending with a bellman (beautiful-faced Bobby Steggert).

Until now, there's been no hint that Smith is bisexual-if nothing else, Cairns' tidy staging suggests that he was torn between his impulse to act professional around the schoolgirls, who plainly adore him, and his impulse to bed them. Jane even delivers a vulgar monologue detailing how, unbeknownst to Smith, she eyed him masturbating late one night at a pond, far off campus. So when Smith furtively asks the bellman, "Are you a homosexual?" the effect is frankly enraging.

Gotcha endings (and pre-Stonewall-era phrasing) might once have been viewed as edgy and daring-perhaps dramaturgically nervy enough to get the black-wearing, chardonnay-swilling, loft-living Downtown cognoscenti all groovy. That era is a memory-and like The Music Teacher, is best hauled out for private, nostalgic moments, preferably read alone, and in silence.