Playing to the back wall.

Stone, Martha E.

Lives of the Circus Animals by Christopher Bram William Morrow. 352 pages, $24.95

IN YEATS'S "foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart"--the last line of the poem from which the title of this novel is derived--Christopher Bram has found his cast of characters. The stars in Bram's narrative are the aspiring, the one-hit wonders, the bona fide successes, the players behind the scenes. Set in present-day Manhattan and featuring such plot devices as caller ID and unretrieved phone messages, each character is only two or three degrees removed from the next. Just about everyone wants to be famous, and even elementary school productions are treated with the seriousness of a performance at Lincoln Center.

One of Bram's stars is Caleb Doyle, whose second play, Chaos Theory, has just been universally panned. Doyle, "driven and disciplined," has been honing his playwriting chops since high school and had a huge hit with Venus in Furs. His lover Ben, a math teacher, had died of AIDS six years earlier, and he's recently broken up with Toby Vogler. Toby, for his part, hooks up with the very middle-aged and currently single British star Henry Lewse. Lewse is a charming and witty man with a terribly hot temper, starring on Broadway in a Noel Coward-like revival called Tom and Gerry, based on the movie The Palm Beach Story. Toby calls Lewse "the Hamlet of his generation," and Lewse is soon to make his film debut--and a great deal of money--thanks to his London-based agent, who makes a few exasperated telephonic appearances. Lewse is almost willfully helpless at dealing with the exigencies of everyday life and is more than happy to rely on his personal assistant, the beautiful and slightly androgynous thirty-something Jessie, who just happens to be Caleb Doyle's sister.

In a supporting role, there's Frank Earp, Jessie's boyfriend, a failed actor-turned-office manager who's directing a way-off-Broadway show called "2B" (which is in fact the apartment number in which it's being staged). Earp had cast Toby when Toby and Caleb were still together in order to develop a closer relationship with Jessie. It's a real coup for all involved when Lewse agrees to attend a production of "2B," where the boundaries between life and art blur completely. In smaller but pivotal roles, there are Mrs. Molly Doyle, an agoraphobic, pistolpackin' mama, and Kenneth Prager, a second-string theatre critic for The New York Times. It is the intersection of the last two characters that furnishes the novel's resolution, at Caleb's birthday party in his elegant home (bought with the proceeds from movie fights for Venus in Furs.)

Anyone familiar with Times Square will revel in the lovingly rendered details--marquees displaying names of Disney shows that just won't die, the Celebrity Deli at the Milford Plaza, Shubert Alley, Howard Johnson's and its next-door neighbor, the Gaiety Theatre, where Toby dances--just dances--and works hard to figure out the difference between acting and real life. He's the only character who comes right out and discusses his dilemma, but the rest of the characters all hover on that boundary, sometimes watching themselves act, sometimes waiting for us to catch them at it.

Bram occasionally flings us a few red herrings, such as the psychiatrist who happens to treat both Caleb Doyle and Kenneth Prager. Jessie Doyle and Henry Lewse, who are by no means sexual intimates (though she will do virtually anything he requests), engage in such deeply personal name-calling fights that one wonders how they'll ever manage to make up; while Jessie and her boyfriend Frank have some scenery-chewing moments at her illegal, rather squalid sublet on Vandam Street in that no man's land "south of the Village, west of SoHo." These fight scenes are sure to put some readers in mind of a slightly updated version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Lives of the Circus Animals is one of those rare books that justifies the phrase "compulsively readable." When it's over, like the 11 p.m. curtain call of a terrific play, you're both elated and sad. Even though Christopher Brain never writes the same novel twice, it would be fun to follow Lewse and the gang to Hollywood and see what becomes of them.