“Our lives,” says Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Leeds, “are merely strange dark interludes in the electrical display of God the Father.” For New York theatergoers, this summer has been a strange dark interlude in the electrical display of Broadway: in the supposed dog days, before yet another round of hyped projects, lamebrain revivals, and dinner-theater compilation shows lumbers into what passes for life, New York has enjoyed some rare outbursts of real drama that put the official “season” to shame. Perhaps it was inevitable: the legitimate stage has dwindled away in most corners of the Republic to “summer theater,” so why should the big town be the only part of the country without its Fourth-of-July-to-Labor-Day lollipops? The “season” is now so discredited and enfeebled and arouses such little anticipation that there’s both logic and cachet to disdaining it and scheduling your production durin ...

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