Any play that in this day and age begins, "What would you like, sir? "--"What would I like Joseph? I should like you to tell me what Vice means," and goes on in that vein--well, any play like that asks to be taken seriously only at a distance. If there is any poetry (or truth, if that's what you look for) in Duel of Angels, it's not in the dialogue.

In directing the play Charles Ascheim had two reasonable alternatives. He could have had his actors ignore the irrelevant paradoxes Giraudous requires them to babble; or he could have used the mannerism as a foil for occasional revelations of character.

The first method would have depended for conference on perfect timing. The characters would have had to establish, by pause and gesture alone, a basic emotional rhythm. The surface chatter would have served as ironical counterpoint. The blend would have caught the spirit of the play perfectly.

The second approach would have smacked very much of a cheap trick, for most of the time the actors would parody their parts--which would not be hard. Occasionally the masks would have fallen off. This too would have echoed a theme of the play: pretense vs. reality. The effect would have been outrageous. At one point last night Ellery Akers (Lucille) and Peter Johnson (Blanchard) came close to this style. they played the beginning of the third act like an episode out of "I Love Lucy." But the characters never dropped their masks. Their real emotions never became apparent. The scene subsided from farce to mediocre acting.

Anyway, either way the production might have come off. But Ascheim has played it straight. He relies on the words instead of the plot. The show is flat.

I'm not sure that even the most accomplished of productions could have brought the play off, however. The dialogue is rich in sexual philosophizing which sounds good at first hearing but isn't if you stop to think about it, necessarily true. The metaphors and aphorisms are equally snappy, but too many of them don't quite make sense.

The plot is equally baffling. Lucille, a woman of insufferable virtue, has disrupted the love-pre-occupied town of Aix because she won't speak to &anyone who is promiscuous or a cuckold. She refuses to speak to Armand. He realizes that his wife, Paola, is unfaithful. Paola (Cynthia Krause) thereupon drugs Lucille, and with the help of the bawd Barbette (Emily Levinc), convinces her she has been ravished by Count Marcellus (John Ross), the town Don Juan.

By the next morning Lucille has contracted the opinion that her unconscious revel makes her Marcellus' wife. Since she desires to remain married to her husband, Justice. Blanchard, she asks Marcellus to kill himself. That way, when Blanchard returns from his trip, she will be pure as before. Marcellus thinks a continued affair would be more in order, but Armand opportunely arrives to challenger him because of his former liaison with Paola Armand declares he will fight for Lucille instead. Marcellus obliges and is killed.

That doesn't help matters any, however, because Blanchard comes home a day early, and Lucille, feeling herself as yet metaphysically uncleaned, tells all. Blanchard departs in a huff. Paola and Barbette then appear and tell Lucille the truth of the matter. Blanchard comes back briefly to tell his wife to leave his house. To Armand's great consternation, Lucille doesn't fill her husband in on Paola's revelation. Paola, delighted, announces she has won the duel and has proved that life is rotten. O no, cries Lucille, and producing a phial of poison, she kills herself, to prove, so she says, that the world has purity and worth. Exit Paola. Barbette delivers a soliloquy to the corpse about what beasts men are, meanwhile purloining Lucille's jewelry. Curtain.

From the script alone I couldn't tell whose side Giraudoux was on. And I wasn't even left with that everybody-loses-most-of-the-time wistfulness one feels at the end of most of those. Nineteenth Century demi-tragedies where everybody loses. My only strong emotion was that Lucille was a pretty stupid girl.

The way to remedy this would have been to have Miss Akers play Lucille a lot less insufferably. A truly ingenuous moralist might have balanced the play. But Miss Akers' performance stressed Lucille's most annoying traits. Her facial expressions ranged from arrogance to headache.

The other actors had less crucial parts, so they weren't as disappointing. I do wish Miss Krause, whose Paola was the mistress of so many scenes, had let us see some fire or some terror. The way she took command it was hardly a duel.

If you've seen John Ross before, well, he was the same way. He's an engaging fop, but I've seen the character too often to tell whether he was subtly corrupting, as Paola described him, or just pretentious.

Peter Weil has faltered in trying to balance the charm and moral absolutism that make up Armand. Too often he talks too fast. But a good deal of warmth comes through.

Johnson plays the self-important Blanchard at a youthful egotist. I had expected Blanchard to be older. Johnson's approach works for the first half of his part, but he can't get adequately unreasonable in the end.