TV REVIEW : Universe Revealed in an Ant Farm

A beguiling fantasy dramatizing heaven and Earth as a graduate student’s science project whimsically unfurls the new curtain on “Playwrights Theatre” (at 9 tonight on A&E; cable).

Playwright Rich Orloff’s “The Whole Shebang,” originally staged at Theatre 40’s Second Annual One-Act Festival in Beverly Hills, is a wry observation on the great questions of the universe reduced, in a manner of speaking, to an ant farm at a science fair.

Terri Garr and Martin Mull co-star as an ordinary married couple teleported before a panel of professors gathered to hear a student’s defense of his M.U. (Master of the Universe) thesis. The nervous student (the affable Mark Linn-Baker) has created a “self-sustaining, self-involving, matter-based ecosystem,” or “the whole shebang.”

The three-professor panel, dressed in caps and gowns, marvels at the student’s invention of human feet (one professor chortles at their cuteness), the cow, the Ice Age, sex, the Marx Brothers, kidney beans, etc. But they question why he would stock his world with human beings who are so cynical and impractical.

“Why do you go on living?” one of the profs seriously asks Mull and Garr, a blue-collar couple from Dayton, who appear so mundane and trivial as Earth’s specimens that the panel only gives the student a C-plus for his project.

“We go on living . . . “ Garr pauses, “because there’s hope things will get better.”

The 45-minute play, directed with a buoyant touch by Burt Brinckerhoff, reminds you of the spirit and, to some degree, the tone of Thorton Wilder’s drama “The Skin of Our Teeth,” and, in its ant farm/science fair analogy, the piece echoes Mark Twain’s malevolent last novel, “The Mysterious Stranger.”

Rare even for cable’s more venturesome offerings , the show works because it always keeps those feet on the ground.