Gum is an odd, disquieting, short (75 minutes) play leaving a long aftertaste. Set in an unnamed Arab country, it concerns two sisters: Rahmi, the rebellious older one, and Lina, her flighty but more docile junior. They are chiefly in charge of a strict but seemingly not uncaring aunt. Both girls adore a kind of chewing gum from abroad widely believed to contain aphrodisiacs inserted by enemies wishing to undermine Muslim societies by making their women wanton. It all takes place in a walled garden containing a pool used for either purification or sensual pleasure.

Rahmi went for a fatal ride with a couple of youths who fed her the guilty gum that led to a backseat orgy. Now she is promised to Inayat, a conservative young man of unimpressive means and manner. Rahmi is not thrilled: Lina. To whom she is very close, may be somewhat more amused.

The girls receive (unexplained) shipments of American pop music and language cassettes containing rude words, as well as gum. They sing wispy little songs and have their own rituals within the overarching, rigidly patriarchal ones. Inayat keeps calling solicitously, but one of the young seducers makes, in his presence, an unsolicited appearance atop the wall, with distressing consequences. Things get hairier as Inayat now insists on Rahmi's circumcision to ensure her chastity.

Daphne Rubin-Vega, much better here than in rent, is a credible Rahmi, and mercurial angel Desai an even better Lina. Firdous Bamji strikes me as a bit too understated as Inayat; Lizan Mitchell is a properly inscrutable auntie—if only Loretta Greco, the otherwise adequate director, had not placed her so often front and center and in-our-face. The able dramatist Karen Hartman writes with pithy incisiveness and an astute ear, though I wonder whether the ending could not have been made clearer.

--NEW YORK MAGAZINE

SISTERS RAHMI and Lina share secrets, baths and — most ecstatically of all — gum. The sweet smell and "burst of hidden flavor" are only two aspects of chewing gum's sensual delights that the sisters savor. Rahmi has also tasted a type of gum available furtively in their country that leads to sexual arousal. Perhaps that's why gum has been banned for young women who must remain virgins.

In the fictitious nation imagined by playwright Karen Hartman in her intriguingly mysterious, succinctly titled "Gum," women are wrapped in full-length black veils (over the red-hued garments they display only in private) and are subject to arranged marriages and virginity checks by doctors before their betrothals. Most arc also "circumcised" to prevent them from feeling much sexual pleasure.

Rahmi — played by Daphne Rubin-Vega with the same sinuous, smoky-voiced sexuality and vulnerability that made her such a compelling Mimi in the original cast of "Rent" — escaped that fate as a girl. Now she is being sought for marriage by a handsome young perfume merchant who is drawn to her untamed embrace of pleasure. "I want her wild," he says. But he also predicts that, "like a wild-eyed bird, you will nest."

Unfolding with dreamlike intensity, Hartman's 75-minute-long play often explodes in bursts as strange and wonderful as the forbidden Juicy Fruits and Doublemints of this Middle Eastlike land. The playwright is particularly acute in depicting the close, intricate relationship ("We would play torture," Lina recalls fondly of their childhood days) between the sisters.

Rahmi, who is 20, and the teenage Lina (played with quicksilver grace by Angel Desai) are passionately devoted to each other. They spend most of their days in an elegant walled garden (complete with an onstage pool in Myung Hee Cho's handsome set, part of an altogether beautifully designed production), wistfully talking of the world outside, biting into fresh sticks of gum and, in Lina's case, learning English from tapes sent by a cousin in America. Lina, for reasons we learn about later, is obsessed by the treachery of language and ambigu- • ity of her own identity.

Director Loretta Greco creates a palpably suffocating atmosphere around these two gilded-caged young women and keeps us off-balance about the motives of the courteous suitor, Inayat (Firdous Bamji), a hard-working man who may be genuinely in love with Rahmi, or at least with the social advancement that becoming part of her family represents.

Sometimes, unfortunately, the play sounds a bit too polemical and poetical, as speeches about smells, cleanliness and the invisible, invincible parts of women well up repeti-tiously. The sisters' caretaker, their Auntie (Lizan Mitchell), has the unfortunate line, "We live in an interconnected world."

But such lapses are easily overlooked in a work that, inspired by a 1996 newspaper article about rumors of aphrodisiac gum corrupting Egyptian college girls, transcends its political agenda to create a lyrical fable about sex, love, danger and virtue. •

--Aileen Jacobson NEWSDAY