Add to Green Ginger's sharp humor some atmospheric lighting and well-chosen sound effects (including appropriate opera), and scarcely an opportunity is missed in this splendidly acted, eerie, funny and touching show.

What's unmistakable, as this splendidly acted and powerful film makes so painfully clear, is the profound sense of loss and waste.

It is not an idiosyncratic interpretation like Lee Breuer's recent gender-switching version (situated in the American state of Georgia), but a splendidly acted production that reaches to the heart of the tragedy of self-deception and of suffering leading to self-knowledge.

"Don't put your business in the street," advises a character in this splendidly acted production of August Wilson's early comic drama about a gypsy-cab company in Pittsburgh.

When the writing allows, as in a final telephone scene that is splendidly acted, Mr. Connolly gets a grip on the essence of the fearful, unattached man who's fixated on the late 1950's.

NEVER have so few drunk so much as in Beth Henley's new play "Ridiculous Fraud," commissioned by McCarter Theater Center and receiving a splendidly acted and directed world premiere here at the Berlind Theater.

In this splendidly acted production, which opened last night at the Second Stage Theater under Marion McClinton's direction, the storefront window of the gypsy cab company that gives "Jitney" its title seems to stretch right up to heaven.