Play Time A Spring Bill Of Stars And Stripes

Theater folks do not necessarily divide their season in half when it arrives at the crease between two calendar years. Such a division makes great sense, however, to a newspaper type entrusted with the compiling of seasonal previews.

Let's face it: not even the producers of live theater are always dead sure in September, when these roundups usually run, what gems they'll be whipping into shape in the spring. Then there are such other imponderables as what more saleable actors might be available a few months hence, what new touring productions might come tumbling into one's lap, what brawling new plays might pour from the pens of authors lusting for a workshop in which to mold a raw script into a masterwork.

The 1992 half of the 1991-92 theater season in Philadelphia has much more to pique the attention of the theatergoing public than the arrival of Andrew Lloyd Webber's vaunted "Phantom." Two major American playwrights - Edward Albee and Lanford Wilson - are testing new plays here this spring. A not inconsiderable amount of star power is descending upon us, some of the names being Linda Hunt, Bobby Morse, George Peppard, Susan Clark, Edward Herrmann, Jack Carter, Debra Monk, Jerry Orbach, Tammy Grimes, Lainie Kazan . . .

Come-alives from the past via dynamic stage presences include Truman Capote, Walt Whitman, Clarence Darrow, trumpeter Lee Morgan, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Isadora Duncan, Raoul Wallenberg and a whole family of Booths. New adaptations of Euripides, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Faulkner beckon the classical-minded.

You get the picture. Listen, glom the following and make your own lists. Better yet, go see a play - there's something here for every taste and budget.

JANUARY

LADY-LIKE. The "Ladies from Llangollen," as Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby were called from 1778 to 1829, are said to have been the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas of their day. These highborn intimates of the literary, artistic and scientific achievers of their time, who fled Ireland to establish an unconventional salon in Wales, are limned in the East Coast premiere of a play by Laura Shamas, 1992's first offering of the Philadelphia Theater Co. at Plays and Players, 1714 Delancey St. Through Jan. 26. 592-8333.