MANIFEST DESTINY. The Land of Opportunity. California or Bust.

The most important ideological element in American history has been the desperate search for the Big Score, the Real Deal, the pot of gold at the end of the red, white, and blue rainbow. The quest for the material epiphany to the American dream attracts thousands to Hollywood. Las Vegas, Wall Street, and even a ramshackle Wyoming boomtown called Gillette.

To this eponymous town, circa 18.90, come two men hot in pursuit of the dream. Mickey Hollister (John Bottoms), an experienced roughneck going rapidly downhill, and Bobby Nobis (John Stehiln) a young software salesman-turned-cowboy, are after the big paychecks available in the oil boom of the late '70s.

Problem is, several thousand other shiftless men have the same idea, and almost as soon as Mickey and Bobby wake up in the morning, they discover that one of them has gotten the boot. In a gesture of amyl-nitrate reinforced friendship, both gentlemen quit, sealing their bonds of brotherhood and looming poverty.

With matters this bad, the only direction in which a real plot can go is down--and this Gillette's does rapidly. Mickey's goods get ripped off, and Bobby is nailed to the floor by an angry biker. Disgusted by the venality of human beings in the city (and without enough money to pay the rent), Bobby and Mickey decide to set up housekeeping in the desert and get back to nature. The traditional home of the American Man of the West.

AUTHOR WILLIAM Hauptman has an American history fixation stronger than Bernard Bailyn's. Last year the American Repertory Theatre (ART) mounted his Big River, a dramatization of America a la Huck Finn. It proved an effective combination: Hauptman's middle-brow dramatic sensibilities were perfectly in key with Twain's wise hicks.

If Twain were alive today, he certainly would have written about Gillette. A real-life town in the real-life state of Wyoming, Gillette's brief history as a low-life. Mecca combined the worst features of "The Dodge City Story" and "Newark Today." Hauptman believes he has discovered in this town that most prized of creatures, the metaphor. Unfortunately, he has only come across a setting, or at best a case study.

Gillette the play, however, is injured by Hauptman's desire to explore fully Gillette the non-existent metaphor The springs and wires of Hauptman's plot are so obvious that the set deserves some telegraph lines in the background. It seems as though the play was plotted first, with characters added as an afterthought. A case in point: Cherry Jones's first appearance as Jody Bobby's blue denim romantic obsession is very funny she's a biker's moll with a nuclear war phobia and a vearning for a little TECC. when sheappears next, she has undergone a complete metamore phosis from a lizzy devil-may-care funster to a kind but money-grubbing waitress. Thematically, Bobby offer clear expression of the leveling power of social intercourse: dramatically, Bobby is mud.

FORTUNATELY, THIS play quite a bit less than the sum of its parts An excellent dialoguesmith, Hauptman distributes juicy one-liners with admirable magnanimity (a prostitute recalling her decision to hit the street says "I realized I was sitting on a gold mine"). Hauptman's generosity keep the laughs rolling, but at the cost of reducing his characters to sitcom personalities. Hauptman's attempts to add a few moments of drama completely collapse; characters who whip out quips at the pace of a Noel Coward cannot carry a dramatic scene.

David Wheeler's direction efficiently transfers Hauptman's work from script to stage with all its virtues and vices intact. Only a jarring transition from city to desert, towards the end of Act I, jars the airy feel of play, set designer Karen Schulz wins low-key kudos for her subtle desert bachelor's pad, and the dry desert backdrops.

Wheeler wisely cast actors strong on the comic aspect. John Bottoms moves smoothly from Roy Orbison raptures to sputtering outrage to weary depression; he can't quite bring off the tender pathos written into the script, but few could do any better. Stehlin turns a stock soap opera part (the idealistic male ingenue) into a combination of Matthew Broderick and Woody Allen acting out a Roy Rogers fantasy; he suffers worst from the capricious plotting, and can't expand his stage presence into a full three dimensions.

One day the Sisterhood of Streetwalkers should sue every play or screenwriter who utilizes the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold; Hauptman uses two of them, played by Diane D'Aquila and Gayle Keller. D'Aquila brings more cynical bite to her roll than called for, and gets saddled with the metaphoric burden of being not just a prostitute, but an American Indian prostitute.

GILLETTE IS NOT the only lost, at the Hasty Pudding this month. Claptrap, the other one of two new comedies mounted by the ART this month, biographies the wacked-out encounter of an incompetent actor with an inept author. American theater is fascinated with losers; with the exception of musical comedy, most original plays seem to have spring from the forehead of Willy Loman.

Why is theater so fascinated with failure? Could it be the sense of inferiority the American stage occasionally displays towards the European? The jealousy of the theater towards the mega-successful cinema? An expression of the neurotic personalities typical of live performers? Perhaps the theater cannot represent the heroic or estimable man without having him bursting into song or a nice two-step. Bobby, raised on the Rifleman and Gunsmoke, discovers that the last of the working class heroes is dead; not only have cowboys disappeared, but their ideals are bankrupt in the urban jungle. The modern hero, such as The Kid in Purple Rain, is a creature of the media; he lives and prospers through the forces that have been nudging theater to the margins. Larger-than-life means being a master of the music, sound, and light, that can be carried in a cassette, a boy or girl on film--to quote mediamasters Duran Duran. Competing with characters that are more than a single man, how can the theater survive but by capitalizing on its weakness?