WE just had a busy week in the theater, in which, to be honest, the only good news was old news. The main event, so to speak, was Jeffrey Horowitz’s splendid Theater for a New Audience, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in a distinctly unsplendid fashion, with a show at The American Place Theater.

This lack of splendor came from the dogged importation of Joanne Akalaitis’ version of the Euripides classic, “The Iphigenia Cycle,” previously staged at the Court Theater in Chicago.

Akalaitis is a director of the old-fashioned avant-garde, terminally cute and desperately irrelevant. Her heart belongs to dada, her soul to the funny papers.

There is doubtless something good to be said about this disastrous “Iphigenia,” but after 3 minutes of concentrated cogitation, I cannot come up with anything.

The new translation by Nicholas Rudall is banal and flat, often balancing on the brink of unneeded humor. Phrases such as “What is a prophet? – he is lucky if he gets one right out of 10” and “We have not come all this way to go back at the last minute,” lack something of the purple panoply of Greek tragedy. But with Akalaitis’ staging, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The story is, not unexpectedly, about Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and princess of that unhappy House of Atreus. In Euripides’ play, Iphigenia, saved from being sacrificed, is now on the island Tauris, where the barbarian (non-Greek) king puts her in charge of preparing for sacrifice such victims (Greeks) who have been shipwrecked and captured.

Her brother Orestes arrives, having just murdered their mother Clytemnestra (see Sophocles’ “Electra,” magnificently presented at a theater two blocks over), and is now pursued by Furies. It all ends remarkably happy except, in this particular sorry production, for lovers of the theater.

Akalaitis’ staging is gratuitously stupid, with the chorus coming on like cheerleaders, waving colored umbrellas. The production also tries to show how hip it is by using microphones, characters smoking cigarettes and the sophomoric like, but the acting is as bad as the direction.

Additionally, Iphigenia looks anorexic enough to be auditioning for “Ally McBeal,” bald-headed Orestes has a bad case of the twitches, etc., etc.

I would like to say, for the record, that the Theater for a New Audience is a fine organization, and that all is forgiven if not quite forgotten. Come back soon! *

Now, on with the motley! And a motley lot indeed it is. The admirable Primary Stages has opened its season with a Canadian comedy, Lee MacDougall’s “High Life.” This has a bunch of morphine-addicted losers, on the fringe of life, planning a bank heist so doomed to failure you could bank on it.

Amusing but trivial, its surrealist idiocies, deployed by puppet caricatures, are mildly engaging. Surprisingly, the piece is carefully plotted for such a flimsy premise.

What might make it worth your passing attention is the fine staging by Casey Childs, artistic director of Primary Stages, and the mannered, but cleverly defined acting of the cast – John Bedford Lloyd as the bemused mastermind of the operation; Isiah Whitlock Jr., as his murderous sidekick; Matthew Mabe, as the front guy and, best of all, David Greenspan as a simple morphine-crazed hysteric. *

I remember reviewing in 1960 a West End production of Leonard Spigelgass’ “A Majority of One.” Mostly, I recall falling in love with Molly Picon’s oddly tasty mix of chicken soup with vinegar, as a post-World War II Jewish widow who finds herself distractedly involved with a Japanese businessman, disconcertingly, if amusingly, played by Robert Morley.

Now it has been revived by the Jewish Repertory Theater in its Siberian East River outpost of Playhouse 91. Crisply staged by Richard Sabellico, it stars a delicately poised Phyllis Newman and, at long last, an Asian-American, the elegant Randall Duk Kim.

Has it dated? Yes. Is it still amusing? It partly depends on your age and your nostalgia threshold, but, I would say, it remains dexterously charming and efficient. Newman and Kim are rather more serious and restrained than was the original concept, which is not always to this light comedy’s benefit. Still, it’s a satisfying show. *

I have for long been accustoming myself to the seeming inevitability that before I die I shall have seen more casts in Yasmina Reza’s “Art,” at the Royale Theater, than in “Hamlet.”

The latest (only the third in New York, but London is approaching double figures), consisting of Judd Hirsch, Joe Morton and George Wendt, is very much up to snuff. Hirsch is smoothly irascible as the control freak, Marc; the splendid Wendt, as the aria-spouting patsy Yvan, is much improved since I saw him play it in London; and Morton proves neatly suave, yet nicely insecure, scoring as the first black member of the trio.

Ironically, Morton is cast as Serge, the one who buys the “white-on-white” painting, which opens the hostilities, and I found myself wondering whether all three of these warring buddies could be played by African-Americans.

Of course they could. OK, but then I wondered, remembering David Mamet’s recent refusal to permit a change of gender in his plays and contrasting Neil Simon’s female “Odd Couple,” whether “Art” could twist its knickers into a feminine trio.

I suspect not. I’ll never know what women talk about when alone in that powder room (although Reza, a woman playwright, shows shrewd insights on the frailty of men), but I imagine women are much smarter and more honest. Don’t you?