RECKLESS

[ 1/2] (One and one-half stars)

The Manhattan Theater Club at the Biltmore Theater, 261 W. 47th St. (212) 239-6200.

THE revival of Craig Lucas’ “Reckless” isn’t so much reckless as plain stupid.

Its star – the phenomenally gifted actress and critics’ darling, Mary-Louise Parker – needs all her gifts and all the goodwill she can get for this whimsically silly, pseudo-profound play, staged by Mark Brokaw for the Manhattan Theater Club, in association with the Second Stage Theater.

First given in 1983, “Reckless” was revised in 1988 and has now apparently been revised again. Perhaps it’s beyond fixing.

In fairness, though, “Reckless” has an intriguing point of departure – one of those unexpected banana-skin points after which life can never be the same.

It comes when Rachel (Parker) is in bed with her husband one Christmas Eve, and, in a rush of guilt, he tells her he has just placed a contract on her life and the hit man is about to break in downstairs to help him stage her murder.

Horrified, Rachel escapes into the snowy, silent night skimpily clad only in her housedress and slippers.

Struggling to the nearest public telephone (luckily, she seems to carry change in her housedress), she tells friends of her plight, but they refuse to take her seriously. (That Rachel – such a kidder.)

Then fate intervenes – and this is the seriously obvious fortune-cookie theme of Lucas’ Christmas phantasmagoria: Things just happen. And things keep on happening: In Lucas’ view, we are all the crazed victims of a crazy fate, so we should just relax.

So saying, Rachel is picked up by a dour but stalwart Lloyd (Michael O’Keefe) and taken back to the home he shares with his girlfriend, Pooty (an understandably subdued Rosie Perez), an apparently deaf paraplegic. (That role, incidentally, Parker herself played in the ill-advised 1995 movie version of “Reckless,” starring Mia Farrow.)

Lloyd and Pooty give Rachel warmth, shelter and – as an unexpected Christmas present – a hair-dryer. Later they even find her a job and she adopts a new identity – one just as ditzy as the one she had before.

On and on the play totters and teeters – through TV game-shows, murder by champagne and other mayhem – until at last Rachel ends up as a psychiatrist in Alaska counseling her long-lost son. Clearly, things have happened.

This dismal apology for a play is weakly directed and, by and large, very poorly acted. But I feel I must make some kind of case for the indomitable, unsinkable Parker.

She has a role tantamount to that of the little Dutch boy holding his finger in a broken dyke, vainly trying to prevent a flood. Such heroism never works, but is intermittently engaging.

Seemingly always on the verge of an orgasmic giggle, she often manages to suggest the tragic subtext to craziness, that awesome progression from a giggle to a scream.

It’s a fascinating performance, but to no avail.

The entire cast, including the highly talented Lucas and Brokaw, should take solace in a phrase from the play: “The past is something you wake up to.”

So, wakey-wakey!