NEW YORK -- This year's surprising flood of actual plays on Broadway probably has several causes, including global warming and plots by the illuminati. But it most definitely has to do with star power, the ingredient that will persuade a hard-headed Broadway producer to put real money into, say, a 1962 absurdist tragedy by Ionesco.

That would be "Exit the King," and the bankable reasons for that fine production are the stars, Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon. In this context, of course, "stars" means movie or TV stars (who often turn out to have extensive stage backgrounds) -- theater stars are found on stage as a matter of course.

Other such stars currently treading the Broadway boards include Phylicia Rashad, Brian Dennehy and Matthew Broderick, while earlier this year saw Jane Fonda, Joan Allen, Jeremy Irons and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Then there are the stars of today's handful of short reviews, including Angela Lansbury, James Gandolfini, Nathan Lane and John Goodman. It's actually a pleasure to reach "The Norman Conquests" and discover no stars at all but a brilliant six-person ensemble from England, ensemble being at the heart of what they do.

Yazmina Reza's play is a tart comedy about the anxieties and aggressions that lurk beneath the polished exteriors of even the professional upper middle class. Its considerable appeal depends about equally on the shock of the unraveling of "civilized" behavior, Reza's aphoristic dialogue (seen also in her crisp, sure-handed "Art" and "Life X 3," to name two) and the fine acting, heightened subtly toward the surreal.

Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden play the parents of a young boy injured in a schoolyard fight with another boy, whose parents, played by Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis, have come to discuss the situation and make amends. But veneers are quickly stripped away, and in 90 minutes the four pair off in every possible combination for recrimination and worse.

That civilized life can be so red in tooth and claw is prefigured in Mark Thompson's modern apartment set, with its bright red wall, ceiling and floor. Its width increases the characters' appearance of isolation, even as their alliances shift and mutate.

The tensions between civility and art, on the one hand, and defensive ferocity on the other are most fully found in Harden. As her husband, Gandolfini plays a milquetoast whose resentments are all too ready to explode. Davis and Daniels are the slicker couple, he an offensive, high-powered lawyer -- although his superciliousness can't match the London performance by Ralph Fiennes.

If you feel a faint sense of off-register, it may be because Reza's play was written about two Parisian couples, and it was played that way in Christopher Hampton's translation in London. But here, Hampton and Reza's usual English director, Matthew Warchus, have turned the four into Americans, inserting some American references, leaving a trace of cultural indeterminacy.

The result is still a rousing dark comedy that provides plenty to think about and has won Tony nominations for all four actors.

At the Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45 St.; 1-800-432-7250.

Surprisingly, Samuel Beckett's great comi-tragic parable about feckless mankind, adrift between birth and death, hasn't been seen on Broadway for more than 50 years. But it has been produced often everywhere else, and it long ago ceased to seem an impenetrable mystery and took its place as the definitive play of the 20th century.

Anthony Page's production reminds us why, in spite of odd quirks due to the star casting -- or maybe it's just that I have an idea of "Godot" that any production has to measure itself against.

The two tramps/clowns, brainy Didi and instinctual Gogo, are played by Bill Irwin, all elbows and puzzlement, and Lane, a puddle of feeling. No, not quite: nothing can entirely banish the serrated sarcasm in Lane's voice, so this Gogo sometimes seems more satiric than Didi. I don't say that's wrong, just that it challenges my sense of the characters. But the two work together beautifully, like Frick and Frack or Yin and Yang, resulting in a composite portrait of mankind as hapless, hopeless and determined to persevere.

Goodman plays the domineering Pozzo, who arrives with the ironically named Lucky on a leash, then returns in Act 2, sadly transformed. Goodman is vast, a tyrant much more bumbling and sensitive than you usually see. Playing Lucky, John Glover is a pitiable wraith who makes the most of his famous rant, even though I think director Page lets the two clowns obscure too much of it with their antics.

Astonishingly, only Glover has a Tony nomination, a measure of how this year of stars has upped the ante. Of the others, the most deserving of a nomination is Irwin.

At Studio 54, 254 W. 54 St.; 1-212-719-1300.

And now for something as insubstantial as a shadow of the previous plays. "Blithe Spirit" is Noel Coward's 1941 jeu d'esprit (literally) about a man who hires a medium as part of his research for a novel. She inadvertently raises the spirit of his dead first wife, who sets out to torment him and his second wife, pending a couple of clever twists you can probably see coming.

It's a thin but workable comedy, distinguished mainly by the medium, Madame Arcati, and spiced with a soupcon of serious commentary on Coward's usual subject, the difficulty of sustaining happiness in any relationship, where stasis inevitably sets in.

As you'd expect from a consummate playwright-actor, "Blithe Spirit" is all about the acting. Director Michael Blakemore's production is distinguished mainly by Angela Lansbury, who is having a devilish good time as the gung-ho, no-nonsense medium, complete with British stick-to-itiveness, brass-bottomed confidence and some giddy, tottering dance steps as she works herself into professional form.

The author is played at by Rupert Everett, who doesn't seem to be acting so much as languishing attractively, unctuous and self-satisfied. As the wives, Christine Ebersole (dead) and Jayne Atkinson (alive) are contrastingly fetching and infuriating (Ebersole) and unsympathetic and starchy (Atkinson). Kudos also to Simon Jones and Deborah Rush, who play a visiting couple, and little Susan Louise O'Connor, who plays one of those Coward gems, the not-so-mousy maid.

At the Shubert Theatre, 225 W. 44 St.; 1-800-432-7250.

One of the masterpieces by the astonishingly fecund Alan Ayckbourn, this 1973 trilogy is three independent but tightly interlocking plays which involve the same six members of one family. All take place in the same English household on a weekend in July.

"Table Manners" is set in the dining room, "Living Together" in the living room and "Once Around the Garden" ... well, you get it. Each play has four scenes, each one just preceding or following a scene in one of the other plays, except for two scenes set at the same time. In essence, characters exit a scene in one play only to enter a scene in another play -- and yet each of the three plays stands on its own feet as a comedy about marital instability and early middle-age disquiet.

That is to say, each play is delicious in its own right, but if you see more than one, the resulting side-lights and insights lift the comedy to a higher plane. And it's hard to imagine a better company than this, imported intact from a run at London's Old Vic.

The family consists of a sick mother, whom we thankfully never see; her two daughters and one son; and their two spouses and one irresolute fiance. The two married couples have left their children with in-laws and have come down to see mother, who is being cared for by the unmarried daughter. The title, a punning reference to the defining event of English history in 1066, refers also to Norman, married to one of the daughters, who manages in the course of the weekend to get involved with all three women.

This is masterful comic writing of character, which makes it a tour de force workout for the actors and a delicious intellectual game for audiences. How the Tony nominators selected four of the six is beyond me, and director Matthew Warchus has to compete with himself as director of "Carnage."

At the Circle in the Square, 1633 Broadway; 1-800-432-7250.