NEW YORK -- We think of today's Broadway as primarily home to musicals, but it can also stage plays at the very highest level. Witness three recent openings: a starry revival of an American master's first successful play, Arthur Miller's "All My Sons"; a new play by a living American master, Horton Foote's "Dividing the Estate"; and a star-led revival by a Russian master, Chekhov's "The Seagull."

Although it has proved controversial, this revival of Miller's 1947 Broadway success is brilliantly conceived and carried out with assurance and eclat. It takes a solid, mid-century American tragedy and reveals a tragic grandeur beyond that of more prosaic, traditional productions.

The problem with "All My Sons" is that, treated as prosy backyard realism, it tilts toward melodrama, which undercuts its homier virtues. But director Simon McBurney (famed for his uniquely inventive Complicite company) realizes it is really tragic poetry and aims higher, where what might seem melodramatic registers as terrible and grand.

If you want theoretical justification, see the interview with McBurney in the most recent issue of American Theatre magazine. But it needs no theory to appreciate his mastery on stage: all you have to do is open your mind to the ways in which theater can soar higher than the limiting realism of film.

The hallmarks of the almost-Greek grandeur McBurney recovers in "All My Sons" are many. There's the spare but massive set, a grassy backyard marked by gates at each side and backed with a soaring blank wooden wall, pierced with just one door and one high, lonesome window. There's a supporting cast of 11, twice that called for, used like a Greek chorus to represent the community omnipresent in watchful judgment. Their acting is pitched just above realism, joining the setting to frame the action with portentous significance. And McBurney begins the play with a terrifying nighttime storm, alerting us to the size of what follows.

In the center stand four stars whose names are certainly the draw for most audiences but who have the discipline to play within McBurney's world.

John Lithgow is bewildered Joe Keller, the caring husband and father with a terrible secret. Dianne Wiest is his fearful wife, Kate; Carnegie Mellon University grad Patrick Wilson is their thoughtful son, Chris; and Katie Holmes, making her Broadway debut if not her first professional stage appearance of any kind, is Chris' intended, Ann, formerly engaged to marry his brother, who was killed in the war.

Ann is the daughter of Joe's former partner, who was sent to jail for shipping out faulty airplane parts that killed American fliers. Joe was exonerated. But her arrival, followed by her vengeful brother, stirs long-buried truths. The play works like Greek tragedy, each denial leading to a fresh revelation.

The stars have been justly praised (Holmes not so much) for the passionate realism of their performances. The showdown between father and son is harrowing. But the breathtaking opening storm, large supporting cast, ominous background music and that soaring wall on which are projected war scenes -- all move the play toward thrilling, operatic tragedy and make "All My Sons" a greater play than I would have believed.

At Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W. 45th St., through Jan. 11; 1-800-432-7250.

The new play by Horton Foote, an American treasure at 92, finds him in a simultaneously expansive and puckish mood. "Dividing the Estate" is a robust comedy of dysfunction as a large, three-generation family in Foote's favorite semifictional town of Harrison, Texas, squabbles over how to divide the inheritance that they thought would sustain them forever.

This is one of those plays where you could use a family tree to keep track of the eight family members (plus two girlfriends and three servants). But gradually figuring out how they relate to each other, both literally and figuratively, is part of the fun. And it's also the drama: Genealogy is destiny, and as characters fight against it, you get drama and comedy.

The matriarch in her 80s is Stella (Elizabeth Ashley, in easy command of the stage).

Her three children are Lewis (the fine Gerald McRaney), seemingly addled but with surprises in store; unflappable Lucille (Penny Fuller); and very flappable Mary Jo (Hallie Foote, the playwright's daughter). Lucille's competent if boring son -- named, in that confusing Southern way, Son (Devon Abner) -- manages the family estate, which is mainly farmland. Mary Jo's hustler husband, Bob (James DeMarse), arrives with their two whiny, 20-ish daughters.

Son's intended, Pauline (Maggie Lacey), is a cheerful librarian with many facts but socially tone deaf. Meanwhile, the old black major domo, Doug (Arthur French), is failing at 92, clearly playwright Foote's wry comment on his own age. Watching Foote weave these and others into the ongoing drama is worth a grad class in expository technique -- remind the forgetful, repeat for the deaf, introduce to the newcomer, rehash for the slow-witted.

Will Stella allow the estate to be divided? Who will get what? Hallie Foote is the irritating and obsessive chief provocateur, but she's also deliciously dry. I'd take this dysfunctional family any time over the even more tempestuous one in last year's big prize-winning family play, "August: Osage County."

At Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th St.; 1-800-432-7250.

Chekhov's tragicomedy features a great performance by the beautiful Kristin Scott Thomas as the grand but petulant actress, Arkadina, and several fine supporting performances. It is firmly directed along modern lines by Ian Rickson, which is to say, it emphasizes the comic randomness of lives as they swirl toward despair.

But it is not the revelation I expected, mainly because some of the other performances are ordinary. I think that may be a collateral effect of Rickson's direction, which correctly refuses to let the actors play on our emotions but leaves the less adroit high and dry.

Not Scott Thomas. She is breathtaking in her willingness to abase herself, to swerve in an instant from grand to petty, from kittenish to beastly.

You see the manipulative desperation of the aging beauty fighting to retain her sway, neglectful of the desolation she causes. Matching her are Carey Mulligan's dewy-eyed, eventually desperate Nina, and Art Dorn's perfectly pitched Dorn.

The major shortfall comes in the pallid Trigorin and Konstantin of Peter Sarsgaard and Mackenzie Crook. I realize that is part of Trigorin's point, but the actor should make that emptiness interesting. And in more than a half-dozen professional "Seagulls," I've never seen a Konstantin about whom the audience could care so little. (Contrast Mark Rylance in the 1992 American Repertory Theatre production.)

This Lincoln Center/Primary Stages production of a basically imported British revival is staged with spare beauty. But without its Arkadina on stage, it languishes.

At Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St.; 1-800-432-7250.