PLAYWRIGHTS CAN SATIRIZE their societies in two different ways. They can look at things at their worst, at their most blatantly divergent from the professed ideals of the people around them. Or they can take the professed ideals at their noblest and best, but without blinding themselves to the realities they mask, so that the realities begin to show through only gradually, in glimmers, in a way that's painful and impossible to dispute. The first method usually presents a clearer statement. Since its techniques are more direct, more didactic, more immediately biting, the criticisms the playwright presents leap out at the audience. They can't be missed. But when a playwright looks at his society in a sympathetic way, and lets the criticism flow naturally from the interactions of the characters he presents, he's operating on a much subtler level.

THE BEGGAR'S OPERA is as immediately biting as they come. Originally produced in 1728, in a London where starving people were hanged for stealing a shilling's worth of property, it tells about a gang of thieves, fences and jailers supposedly much like the high officials who surrounded Horace Walpole, the first prime minister of England. From time to time, the characters explain that they are at least more honest than England's unpunished rich people, but mostly they're too busy trying to sell each other out. At the end, Macheath the highwayman--the original of Weill's and Brecht's Mack the Knife, in their updated Threepenny Opera--stands with a rope around his neck while a beggar-narrator explains that for strict poetical Justice he'll have to be hanged and all the other characters hanged or transported, but that as in operas it doesn't matter how absurdly things turn out, he'll be reprieved instead. Then the characters dance a nice dance about the inconstancy of fortune, and the audiences live happily ever after.

As is only right for a caricature set in the 18th century, the City Center Acting Company's stage looks like a Hogarth drawing: all prison bars and a commandingly placed gallows and overflowing with prostitutes and thieves, all hungry though some of them are fat, all sharply etched and ornately dressed. Kevin Kline is a fine Macheath, and the rest of the cast is pretty uniformly good, too, although it's hard to understand a few of the actresses when they start to sing. John Gay, the friend of Pope and Swift who wrote the play, scattered popular ballads and songs through it like arias, with new and more appropriate lyrics, so that Macheath comments on his sentence to a variant of "Greensleeves":

But Gold from Law can take out the Sting;

And if rich Men like us were to swing,

'Twould thin the Land, such Numbers to string

Upon Tyburn Tree!

But the musicians are fine, and some of the songs--a beautiful first-act cotillon about how Youth's the Season made for Joys, for instance--come through beautifully. They all help the ironic stylization virtually imposed on director Gene Lesser by the play's ironic, stylized speech--"Money, Wife," Mr. Peachum the fence explains, "is the true Fuller's Earth for Reputations, there is not a Spot or a Stain but what it can take out."

And because Lesser doesn't let the irony falter even for a minute--"I have a fixt Confidence, Gentlemen, in you all," Macheath explains, taking out his revolver--the love some of his numerous wives persist in feeling for him, even though they know that in a depraved world love is a sad mistake, can serve as the standard of condemnation for the world that makes it a mistake. "One may know by your Kiss, that your Gin is excellent," Mr. Peachum remarks, but his less capable daughter can only explain sorrowfully that she can't stop loving her husband--and that, coupled with the wit implicit in a good production, is what carries The Beggar's Opera beyond cynicism into anger.

ANTON CHEKHOV wrote The Three Sisters is 1900, four years before he died. Russia in 1900 was not a very calm place. Lenin and Trotsky were in exile after a police crackdown on factory agitation. Corruption in government and business was widespread, and the peasants were as hungry as they'd always been. Chekhov's play focuses on the aristocracy, who were trying to insulate themselves from the rest of society, so it doesn't present direct comment on any other people's problems. And the aristocrats had no problems, except that they were bored and didn't know what was coming--at least that's what a simple picture might have shown.

But Chekhov's characters are always so human (and thus complex) that they seem important as people, not just as aristocrats. The three sisters are bored with their provincial town. They keep saying they are going to move back to Moscow, the exciting city of their childhood memories, but they never do. They talk about working, about starting life anew. They share the stage with at least half a dozen characters; as in real life, there aren't ever any true "stars."

With as many as eight characters on stage all at once, conversing by thinking private thoughts out loud, talking to each other only in a nominal sense, the acting demands on the company are enormous. All of the actors have to work together to make the non sequiturs of the conversation revealing, and if the conversations aren't clear the characters lose their completeness. Director Boris Tumarin's production emphasizes the gross traits of each character. As a result, Chekhov's caricature (a relatively minor element in Three Sisters, his most expressly serious work) begins to cover up the more humane and characteristic features of the characters.

The City Center's production of Three Sisters is one of mood, not thought, and while the bored yet quietly tense atmosphere of the play is vital it cannot be achieved at the expense of the characters. Tumarin's moody scenes with candlelight make surprisingly effective drama--but ultimately this Three Sisters is a Russian-flavored succotash of simple people, not a Chekhov play.

Some of the problems with the production are pointed up by the American Film Theatre's most recent production, a film of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre production of Three Sisters. None of Olivier's actors play characters without appeal. Chekhov's writing, expressed in a fine performance, makes us sensitive to evervone.

Baron Nikolai, a suitor of one of the sisters, says "How well I understand this craving for work. I've never done a stroke of work in my life." In Olivier's production the line is tragicomic. In the City Center production it is a little joke--some sort of Freudian slip--that only a foolish and insensitive man would make. Natasha, the wife of the sisters' brother, steals a lot of laughs in the City Center version by being so unremittingly vain and petty, but she's stealing from the sensitivity of the play.

A lot of great plays come across well even in a mediocre production. Chekhov never does. Tumarin's City Center production is funny--too funny--but it's good anyway. It can't measure up to the National Theatre's amazing acting, but that's, after all, only a movie of a play, and marred by some jazzed-up silent dream sequences, at that. The parallel monologues of a large number of characters demand a stage: filmed Chekhov never seems to find the right tone.

THE VIENNA of Measure for Measure is something like the London of The Beggar's Opera, a city where ordinary people have no recourse from the justice of their betters, except in miraculous happy endings. The City Center used almost the same set for both plays, and when the costumes for Measure for Measure weren't just cutely 19th century, they emphasized the resemblance too--the prostitutes in Vienna's red-light district, as the program helpfully labels what Shakespeare calls "A Street," could just as well be Londoners.

But Shakespeare's satire cut even deeper than Gay's, pointing not just to people's failure to live up to their ideals, but to the sickness at the heart of ideals that rank continence above saving lives and spur people to die and kill and sacrifice themselves, not for a future where that will be less necessary but in a hopeless quest for a merely personal righteousness. The play is about the inevitable injustice of middle-class justice, which measures justice out as though it were possible to measure people's lives by absolute, fixed units like the monetary standards on which the play's moralists finally rest their morality. Isabel cries, for example, that death is "cheaper" than dishonor.

The City Center gave a good production--we especially liked David Schramm, who played the deputy Angelo, a man purported so cold his urine is "congealed ice," but who is kept warm by his desire for Isabel. As a sort of stupid, bemedalled shopkeeper, Angelo is too unimaginative to notice his own humanity until it firms up and pricks him, like reality pricking through a sentimental ideal. Like Gay, Shakespeare could sometimes take pleasure in this sort of moment. Chekhov was kinder, and accepted things more quietly--but none of the three playwrights questioned that reality will surface, every time.