Our regards to Broadway

My favorite teenager's singleminded determination to see her hero from "Harry Potter" on the Broadway stage induced a fall trip to New York. But Broadway shows are like Lay's potato chips. You can't stop at one.

This London transplant uses much of the original 1970s design -- the metal heads and platform shoes on six horses, dark lighting and a circular set that approximates a surgical parlor. These stage trappings accentuate the inchoate heart of Peter Schaffer's masterwork about unbridled passion. Thea Sharrock directs with a dynamic sense of ritual. "Equus" remains a paean to its era's howl against conformity, and Shaffer himself wonders (in program notes) whether the piece feels dated. In some ways it does, with characters and dialogue that occasionally hit the ear with obvious intent. Yet the essential struggle between restrained normalcy and psychotic zeal seems timeless.

And yes, Daniel Radcliffe makes the transition nicely from wizard boy on film to troubled stablehand on stage. However, his character (Alan Strang) is not the central role in "Equus." Martin Dysart, the child psychologist vexed by his own arid routine, faces the real crisis in his quest to bleed Alan's soul of its frenzy. Richard Griffiths, who shares a film history with Radcliffe, probes the puzzle created by Alan's crime, and through his rumpled inquisitiveness comes to ponder whether he's accomplished anything by stripping out the wildness in his patients. Kate Mulgrew of "Star Trek Voyager" doesn't make much of a mark as the magistrate in charge of Alan's case.

"Equus" does not land, perhaps, with all the psychic thrill that it once did, but this brooding production drives home its disturbing message.

The Tony and the Pulitzer say it better than I ever could, but this is the best show on Broadway. After all that has been written about dysfunctional and disintegrating families, it is astonishing how much meat playwright Tracy Letts still finds on the bone. The ghosts of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill and August Wilson live in the floorboards of this sprawling Oklahoma house, situated on a plain so hot that it "kills tropical parakeets."

The Westons live here, and over the course of three-plus hours, this family loses its grip through bitter recriminations, lechery, incest and drug addiction. Estelle Parsons is a force of nature playing Violet Weston, the unhinged family matriarch who is hooked on painkillers. She is vulnerable yet indomitable, desperate and pathetic yet ferociously cruel and honest. "Some people get antagonized by the truth," she says after unloading at a family dinner.

Violet's daughter, Barbara (Johanna Day), is as strongwilled and impossible as the old lady. As the two tangle, we come to realize Barbara is turning into her mother before our eyes.

Bleak and funny, this play continues to unfold until the very end -- at which point we would gladly sit for another hour. Letts writes in seamless, rhythmic cadences about survival, age, generations, dissipation, obligation; his scenes bristle with ferocity, and director Anna Shapiro orchestrates the whole thing with economy and pitch-perfect sensibility.

After you've indulged in these dense works, "Boeing-Boeing" refreshes like a tangy lemon sorbet. Marc Camoletti's farce about an American rogue who juggles three girlfriends while living in Paris bombed in its 1962 run on Broadway. Reborn last May, it has thrived and won two Tonys -- one for best revival, the other for Mark Rylance's performance. Rylance, whom we remember for his extraordinary work in "Peer Gynt" at the Guthrie last winter, recycles many of those country-rube simplicities. He has a winning Chaplinesque quality with deadpan innocence, ragdoll physicality and idiot- savant wisdom.

Rylance and Christine Baranski, who plays a snarky French housekeeper, are the subtlest things in director Matthew Warchus' production. Rob Howell's set is a creamy half-circle living room, brightly lit and featuring accents of red, yellow and blue -- the colors of the three stewardesses' airlines.

This is a wild farce, with shrieks, slamming doors, perfect timing, ringing phones, pratfalls and mistresses in bedrooms. Paige Davis ("Trading Spaces") is a brassy, sexy American "air hostess." Missi Pyle plays the German with domineering efficiency.

Plus, "Boeing-Boeing" has the coolest pre-show and intermission soundtrack: French covers of 1960s pop hits.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299