EVERY YEAR AT ABOUT this time you overhear the same conversation in the dining hall: "What's your thesis about?" "Well, it's sort of about--well, about appearance and reality." "Funny--mine's sort of about that, too." The old A-and-R theme--and you thought it was original. In difficult times like these, it can be a pleasant relief to get away to Boston and see a play that is explicitly and admittedly about appearance and reality.

Pirandello's Emperor Henry IV, now at the Schubert Theater with Rex Harrison in the starring role, is perhaps not as deep as it would like to be. Neither Harrison's intense acting nor the majestic stage set can lift the dialogue from the realm of the obvious (or the too ambiguous, which sometimes comes to the same thing). The play works best when it attempts to be comic; when the hero lets loose with one of his philosophical outbursts, the audience tends to shuffle its feet. But there is little time to get bored with such a short production (the entire play lasts under two hours, including intermission), and the acting alone makes it an enjoyable if not a memorable evening.

When the curtain first rises, you are plunged into a thickly tangled plot that may take you the whole first act to unravel. Basically, the main character is not really the medieval German emperor, (sigh of relief from those who hate historical plays), but a twentieth-century Italian aristocrat who suffered a fall from his horse during a mock-medieval pageant and remained convinced that he was actually Henry IV. In order to humor him, his relatives have totally recreated Henry's courts, with servants in medieval dress, oil lamps instead of electric lights, visiting abbots and monks--the works. For twenty years "Henry" orders everybody around, demanding obedience to his every whim. With madness like this, who needs sanity?

HENRY OBVIOUSLY arrives at the same conclusion. Although he regains his reason long before those twenty years are up, he keeps mum about it and lets the farce go on. Partly, he really prefers the middle ages (or his view of the middle ages), to the anxiety-ridden twentieth century. Also, being part of recorded history gives him a certain amount of security: he can live in the past and know what to expect instead of living in the present and worrying about the unknown future. But besides all this, Henry feels that he lost his place in the modern world during the years he remained unconscious of it. His friends and relatives have grown old without him, and he himself has grown old as if at once, without sensing the passage of time. Only when he receives an unexpected visit from the woman he once loved, the Countess Matilde Spina, does he finally reveal his sanity, at first only to his servants, but eventually to the rest of the company.

What situation could be more conducive to the appearance-reality theme? Not only do we have a play within a play, which consists of everybody dressing up to fool Henry while he acts a part to fool them; we also get filled to the gills with more mirror imagery than can decently fit into a single play. The throne room is decorated with two life-sized portraits which are supposed to represent mirror images of Henry IV and Matilde of Tuscany, the woman he loves, and their presence stimulates a predictable discussion about the reality of reflections. Much is made of the fact that the Countess Matilde's daughter is the perfect image of her mother as a young woman. To top it off, Henry goes around looking deep into people's eyes and seeing all sorts of past and present images reflected there.

Pirandello only makes things worse by trying to link this theme to the element of time. Which has greater reality, the eleventh century or the twentieth? Youth or age? Such questions try to squeeze profundity out of mere ambiguity. I doubt that even Pirandello knows where he intends them to lead. The play itself is not always strong enough to bear up under the load of philosophical significance, especially when the philosophy seems inconsistent or even meaningless.

SO WHAT SAVES this production? Its comedy, for one thing. Although the play has tragic elements--in a surprise ending, for example, Henry IV stabs his former rival--the comic aspects come through most clearly, and the final impression is certainly not one of sadness. Much of the humor is contained in one-line comments, as when Henry asks Matilde to let the "bowels of compassion" within her be moved by his plea (I wonder how that went in the original Italian), or when he criticizes his servants for revealing the secret of his sanity: "You jeopardized your own position. After all, no madman, no jobs." The insulting backtalk between the Countess Matilde and her lover, Baron Tito Belcredi, provides an element of domestic comedy that lightens the whole play. (This may be harmful in the long run, since it makes us disbelieve the seriousness of Tito's death in the end. We've been led to believe that he deserves every insult he gets, and death is merely the final one.) The director, Clifford Williams, has added his own measure of slapstick humor in the staging. During the mass, for example, Henry cavalierly spills wine on somebody whenever he mentions the Pope's name, and then stuffs the abbot's mouth full of communion wafers, all of which recalls his historical feud with Pope Gregory over the issue of lay investiture. (If you're not well up on eleventh century history, you have to listen especially carefully, since the important facts all come out in quick one-liners near the beginning of the play.)

Staging, in fact, is another of the production's strong points. Abd'el Farrah's scenery is effective and elegant (at least, what I could see of it. The management had stuck me back in the last seat of the orchestra, with the balcony looming over me, so I really only saw half the play--the bottom half). In one of the most dramatic sequences, the two figures which were formerly protraits step out of their frames as live figures (this caused the girl next to me to gasp aloud, and then crumple with embarrassment). Such a gimmick might seem overly stagey or self-consciously dramatic in another kind of play, but here it fits in very well with the whole theme of theatrical pretense.

Rex Harrison is impressive as Henry. Both his physical size and his range of voice give the character more power than the lines alone provide, and his constant shifts from violence to tenderness make us as unsure about Henry's madness as we are meant to be. With the possible exception of Linda de Coff and Rudolph Willrich, who play Matilde's daughter and Henry's nephew without managing to bring any life to their admittedly superficial parts, the supporting cast generally lives up to the star. Eileen Herlie plays the cynical or flamboyant side of Matilde especially well (she gets slightly weaker as the part becomes more melodramatic), and James Donald, as her lover Tito, imitates the lock-jaw aristocratic accent to perfection. As a bearded, bespectacled Doctor with a distinctly Viennese accent, David Hurst fulfills Pirandello's idea of a Freudian parody; any stereotyping should undoubtedly be blamed on the author rather than the actor. Even the four servants or counselors become distinct personalities, especially Landolph (the leader, portrayed with graceful ease by Stephen Newman) and Berthold (a naive raw recruit played by a fellow with the unlikely name of Reno Roop).

How much you will like this play depends on what you want to get out of it. If you really want an answer to the existential questions of appearance and reality, forget it. But if you just want an amusing break from your thesis, then by all means go.