Big Love

The striking set that greets the Wilma Theater audience before Big Love even begins gives notice that the play takes place in a different world. Three very large, Dal?-esque sculptures decorate the curtainless stage: the truncated torso of a naked woman; a tilted, elongated classical column mimicking a lipstick that paints a pair of bodyless lips; and a brawny hand holding an ovoid from which sprouts a flower. A weary woman trudges onto the stage. She's wearing a bedraggled wedding dress that she immediately shucks and, oblivious to whether or not she is being observed, steps naked into a pool of water built into one of the sculptures.

YOU CAN put Tattle face-up on the dining room table today. There are no Tiger Woods stories. Our favorite Allentown actress, Amanda Seyfried ("Mamma Mia" and the upcoming "Dear John" and "Chloe"), will be leaving the HBO series "Big Love" to become a full-time movie star. "She's been exploring her movie career for a couple of years now, and we've been giving her a lot of room to do that," "Big Love" creator Will Scheffer told TV Guide. "I know having a commitment to a show for six months definitely cuts into her ability to pursue that career.

CONSERVATIVES like syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer are shaking the bars of their cages, ranting that a TV show featuring a polygamous family proves that they were right all along - that if gay marriage gained acceptance, polygamy would be next. "With the sweetly titled HBO series 'Big Love,' polygamy comes out of the closet," fulminates Krauthammer. Though having one man married to three women does add a twist to this comic soap opera, the show is hardly an advertisement for this particular alternative lifestyle.

I CAN'T LOOK away. I want to. In fact, I want to walk away. But, I can't. A train wreck? Open-brain surgery on the Discovery Channel? Another "Who's Your Daddy?" brawl on Jerry Springer? No, that's not it. Although "it" does involve a TV and some brawling, of a sort. It is HBO's new series "Big Love. " I guess the "big" in "Big Love" refers to the polygamous union of Bill and Barb and Nicolette and Margene. Or maybe it describes the "love" among and between the three wives.

It's hard to imagine a man with four wives and 28 children craving company so badly that he takes on a mistress. But that's the premise of Brady Udall's uproarious new novel, The Lonely Polygamist (W.W. Norton, $26.95). "It seems absurd," the author says on the phone from his home in Boise, Idaho. "I got the idea when I was talking to some polygamist. He told me one of his friends was having an affair. I thought, 'Why would you have an affair if you were a polygamist?' But it's not always about sex. It can be an escape.

And now, polygamy. With the sweetly titled HBO series Big Love, polygamy comes out of the closet. Under the headline "Polygamists, Unite!" Newsweek informs us of "polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement. " Says one evangelical Christian big lover: "Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle. " Polygamy used to be stereotyped as the province of secretive Mormons, primitive Africans and profligate Arabs. With Big Love, it moves to suburbia as a mere alternative lifestyle.

Syncopated thunder? A mad chorus of jackhammers? The thump and thwack of a monolithic machine? Walk the Line, James Mangold's blazing biography of American music legend Johnny Cash, begins with a mysterious, momentous sound. At first it's off in the distance, but as the camera glides across the central California landscape to the imposing stone walls of a correctional facility, the noise grows closer, louder, frenzied. And then, finally, the source is revealed: a wild assembly of inmates in Folsom Prison stomping and clapping impatiently, even menacingly, waiting for the Man in Black to come out and play them some tunes.

If you're good enough, you don't have to play your good songs, or at least your best ones. Bob Dylan can pull that off. But if you've made only two albums and neither has exactly conquered the radio, then it's probably not time to explore your deep catalog. Yet that's what Patty Griffin did Friday night at the Painted Bride. She ignored her hits ("One Big Love," "Mad Mission") and played only five cuts from her latest CD, Flaming Red (A&M). Three of her 16 songs were unreleased originals, four were covers.

If, at 64, some people are burned out and looking forward to retirement, Charles Mee is certainly not among them. Mee writes plays, and for the last few years he has been turning out about three a year, which is two - or three - more than most playwrights manage. "There's no question that it's the most creative time of my life. It feels good," Mee says, sitting at his kitchen table in sight of the computer, where he would be working were he not being interviewed. Not only is Mee turning out plays at an accelerated pace, which in large part he attributes to the support of a wealthy friend who pays him to write, but also more of his work is getting produced with heightened prominence.

SISTERHOOD, IT turns out, really is powerful. And if you're still waiting to see how HBO's "Big Love" ended, that's all I'm going to say about Sunday's series finale, "Where Men and Mountains Meet," until you've turned the page or clicked through to another story. Consider yourself warned. Sap that I am, I teared up during the final minutes of what for five seasons was easily one of television's most original dramas, a show that sounded like a bad joke when I first heard that Bill Paxton would play a suburban polygamist in a show for HBO (and that actor Tom Hanks, of all people, would be one of its producers)

NIKITA 9 p.m. Thursday, Channel 57. Since "Nikita," the CW's killer reboot, premiered last month, all eyes have been on its fierce and gorgeous leading lady, Maggie Q. But the show's other butt-kicking female is also seizing America's attention. She's Lyndsy Fonseca, a 23-year-old Oakland, Calif., native, who launched her acting career at the tender age of 13 on the soap opera "The Young and the Restless. " Fonseca plays Alex, a troubled teen with a violent history who has been recruited by a shadowy government agency called Division.

IN A CASE of life imitating art, TLC has taken the success of HBO's fictional "Big Love" and launched "Sister Wives," a reality show about a real polygamist and his family. The show is set in Utah. Duh! After only one episode, it's already making headlines, and not because 41-year-old ad salesman Kody Brown has four wives, 13 children and three stepchildren. No, it's because the show caught the attention of Utah law enforcement and triggered a bigamy investigation.

It's hard to imagine a man with four wives and 28 children craving company so badly that he takes on a mistress. But that's the premise of Brady Udall's uproarious new novel, The Lonely Polygamist (W.W. Norton, $26.95). "It seems absurd," the author says on the phone from his home in Boise, Idaho. "I got the idea when I was talking to some polygamist. He told me one of his friends was having an affair. I thought, 'Why would you have an affair if you were a polygamist?' But it's not always about sex. It can be an escape.

Begonias are way underrated. But how can you love what you don't even know? The garden-industrial complex dictates that you won't find wall-to-wall begonias in stores and garden centers. You have to discover them on your own at plant sales, specialty nurseries, and flower shows. Only then will you understand the reaction of Lucy Kuder of Moorestown, when she encountered a flush of begonias 20 years ago at a Boston plant sale. "I was flabbergasted," she says. What is it that so instantly captivates these "begoniacs," as some fans call themselves?

YOU CAN put Tattle face-up on the dining room table today. There are no Tiger Woods stories. Our favorite Allentown actress, Amanda Seyfried ("Mamma Mia" and the upcoming "Dear John" and "Chloe"), will be leaving the HBO series "Big Love" to become a full-time movie star. "She's been exploring her movie career for a couple of years now, and we've been giving her a lot of room to do that," "Big Love" creator Will Scheffer told TV Guide. "I know having a commitment to a show for six months definitely cuts into her ability to pursue that career.

The year was 1970, I think. My best friends, Sherry and Denise, and I excitedly flipped through Soul, the monthly newsletter put out by the R&B station in the San Francisco Bay area. In our young, impressionable eyes, Soul was the equivalent of People magazine. Under the headline "Groups To Watch," there was a picture of five good-looking boys, the youngest doe-eyed and caramel-colored with cutest pug nose you'd ever want to see. The one named Michael, who stole the show every time.

Early in Fleetwood Mac's show at the Wachovia Center Wednesday night, Lindsey Buckingham dropped a reference to the "convoluted emotional history" that spawned many of the band's best songs. Rumours (1977), one of the best-selling albums of all time (and, given the state of the music industry, likely to remain so in perpetuity), was famously inspired by the simultaneous dissolution of the relationship between Buckingham and his then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks and the marriage of John and Christine McVie.

As a musical Valentine's Day outing, there could be no finer entertainment than hearing Rufus and Martha Wainwright do their skewered love songs in a solo setting. He's chamber pop's gay-iconic darling, currently charged with writing his first opera; she's cabaret-folk's reigning chanteuse - and they usually don't perform together. On Saturday at the Kimmel Center, the brother and sister - stripped of their ornamental arrangements and accompanists - allowed their smartly told tales of messy romance, personal politics, and operas real and imagined to ring out. The event was sumptuous, what with the greatest range of Martha's high, dynamic whine and Rufus' sliding trombone tenor at full tilt.