NEW YORK -- Beneath all the varieties theater has evolved, the two basics remain comedy and tragedy, the choice between rebirth or death, laughter or tears. So how better to continue my reports from a busy Broadway season than with paired reviews of two British imports, the giddy physical farce of "Boeing-Boeing" and the dark despair of "Macbeth"?

Each comes with a star, but there are differences. As Macbeth, Patrick Stewart arrives in a nimbus of "Star Trek" TV celebrity, but he's also a thoroughly grounded Shakespearean and veteran of a half-dozen Broadway shows. As Robert, the curious country bumpkin in "Boeing-Boeing," Mark Rylance is still largely unknown to America and gets hardly any entrance applause; and while he's an even more distinguished Shakespearean, for 10 years the leader and star of Shakespeare's Globe in London, this is actually his Broadway debut.

(Click here for an up-date interview with Mark Rylance, especially on a play he's writing about Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick.)

For me, the two shows fell miraculously on the same day: the dark and stirring "Macbeth" in the afternoon and the effervescent "Boeing-Boeing" at night -- salty and sweet, yin and yang, bracing chill and warm embrace.

Director Rupert Goold and his designers start us off with a thunderclap of electronic noise revealing a clinical tiled room like a morgue, a body drenched in blood writhing on a table. Three nurses hover; the king and his commanders gather; and the bloody sergeant gives his report of the ongoing wars.

We seem to have skipped the initial witches' scene, but no: those nurses are the witches in malicious mufti, as we see when, in response to the king's directive to tend the sergeant's wounds, they coldly kill him with a hypodermic needle. It's a hard, cold place, this mid- or late-20th century ward in the charnel house of history.

At the rear is a large freight elevator where warriors and courtiers arrive, billowing the smoke of war or mists off the Scottish heath. Downstage is a sink, hiding place for hideous implements, fount for washing off all that blood or handy place for the drunken porter to pee. A large monitor shows the sergeant's heartbeat and flat-line, but also static-filled news reports and images of war.

These images, projected on the tile walls, bathe the whole space in eerie, crepuscular gloom. They're most powerful when later we see masses of soldiers in formal public squares accompanied with martial music, projections of Macbeth's fascist power.

The 20th century setting warrants many sly details. Amid the staff officers, Ross appears as a sycophantic bureaucrat, assiduously shuffling papers, the butt of rough jokes. The witches' "beards" are the nurses's sterile masks. Morgue tables serve for slicing and dicing, in preparation for a feast. Banquo is murdered on a commuter tram.

Act 1 ends in mid-banquet, Banquo's bloody ghost towering over guilt-stricken Macbeth; Act 2 restarts several minutes earlier, but this time Banquo appears only in Macbeth's mind. There's wild slavic dancing. A background conversation between two lords turns into an interrogation of Ross beneath a ceiling lamp. The witches animate three body bags to show Macbeth their prophecies; Macbeth joins his assassins' assault on Macduff's family; and when we rejoin Malcolm in exile, he's at a cabaret among the English.

I found all this a tonic way to animate famous speeches with fresh purpose. This "Macbeth" certainly speaks directly to today's audience. It's full of detail for the aficionado to savor but as clear as a hammer blow for the novice, as the elaborate revisionism provides heightened urgency. (Shakespeare's own theater updated the story some 500 years, to make it contemporary.)

And Shakespeare's words get their due weight. The text, short to start with, is pruned and reassembled, but intelligently so. The Chichester (England) Festival cast, with sole American Byron Jennings as Duncan, knows how to balance verse with the rhythms of speech.

Stewart first appears as a grizzled NCO in olive drab, the indispensable second in command. But then he joins his lithe, impassioned wife, made electric by the younger Kate Fleetwood in slinky silk. He picks up her electricity, fitfully at first, then steadily, burning his way past redemption, leaving her adrift in his wake.

He toys with the two murderers like a master of the universe, calmly making and eating a sandwich all the while. Inevitably, Stewart spirals down into the pit of guilty ambition. His final "damned be him that first cries 'hold, enough' " is split, so the "enough" stands alone, a voluntary resignation in the face of retributive fate.

The focus is on dark ambition, as if in the recent war-torn Balkans or near East, where we imagine evil, supra-human forces unknown to Western rationalism might still lurk. This "Macbeth" is full of detail for the aficionado but as clear as a hammer blow for the novice.

At the Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St., through May 25; 1-800-432-7250.

Marc Camoletti's seven-door French farce, first staged in English in London in 1962, when it ran seven years (but flopped in New York), is a laugh machine about a Paris lothario who keeps three stewardesses wheeling through his bedroom according to their flight schedules.

Busy British director Matthew Warchus and star Rylance went back to the original French to clean out smirking British additions before staging it last year in London, where I loved it. Now those two have brought it to Broadway, with Rylance surrounded by an American cast: Bradley Whitford ("The West Wing") as the lothario, re-written as an American in Paris; Christine Baranski as the dour French maid; and Gina Gershon, Mary McCormack and Kathryn Hahn as the delectable stewardi.

It's great fun, maybe about 15 minutes too long, but staged like a Rolls-Royce of laugh machines. I can say this with more than the usual authority, because I saw it twice: once as planned with the Post-Gazette ShowPlane group, then, because that was just before critics were invited, again four performances later.

It was even better the second time, especially Whitford, a talented stage actor who had relaxed further as the suave lover whose house of sexy cards comes crashing down. Baranski is impeccably droll as the disapproving maid, and the three lovelies are fine caricatures: Hahn's gum-snapping American, McCormack's gymnastic German and Gershon's gorgeous, kitten-clawed Italian.

Much of the humor registers for us on the astonished faces of Baranski and Rylance. The latter is the star as the introverted school friend (now from Wisconsin) whose eyes widen with awe as he witnesses the luscious lovelies wheeling through his friend's life. Predictably, the scheme unravels, and Robert (Rylance) races about trying to hold it together, forcing him into dizzying reversals of behavior, including amorous brushes with the three, especially the comically intense, stentorian German.

As the ordinary little man driven to frenzy (and saucy fantasies), Rylance shows a deadpan, bumbling physical kinship with some of the great clowns, such as Chaplin, Keaton or Jacques Tati. Pittsburgh knows what a remarkable actor he is from his three Shakespeare performances here, but he is also a comic chameleon. Warning: He plans to stay with the show only until late summer.

At Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St.; 1-800-432-7250.