By Robert Feldberg, Record Drama Critic

OFF-BROADWAY

BAD HABITS: Two one-act plays by Terrence McNally. With Kate Nelligan, Nathan Lane, Faith Prince, Bill Buell, Robert Clohessy, David Cromwell, Michael Mantell, and Ralph Marrero. Directed by Paul Benedict. Scenery by John Lee Beatty. Costumes by Jane Greenwood. Lighting by Peter Kaczorowski. Sound by John Gromada. A Manhattan Theater Club production at City Center, 131 W. 55th St., 1-(212) 246-0102. $ 32.50. Through April 29.

"Bad Habits," Terrence McNally's pair of one-act comedies about methods of curing people afflicted with such flaws, was originally presented in 1973. Watching the revival that opened Tuesday night at the Manhattan Theater Club, one can't help thinking how tied it is to that time.

The first, and far funnier, play, "Dunelawn," directed in antic style by Paul Benedict, is about a posh couples treatment center run on the principle of Club Med. The prescription of the renowned Dr. Jason Pepper, a debonair voluptuary played with wonderful plumminess by Nathan Lane, is for everybody to do exactly as he or she pleases.

Amid a stream of impudent McNally jokes, we meet the guests, who include a pair of coarse newlywed actors unable to get past their mammoth egos. As the unbashful bride, Kate Nelligan sheds her intense image and does a hilarious job impersonating a bitter, loud-mouthed performer whose roles in flop plays go to such "white-bread" actresses as Bette Midler when they make the movie versions. Robert Clohessy is a worthy match as the narcissistic husband.

There's a longtime gay couple (David Cromwell and Bill Buell), who have turned waspish bickering into a way of life; a husband (Michael Mantell) and wife (Faith Prince) who've spent their marriage trying to murder one another, and Otto, a German-accented employee eager to give everyone massages.

The loosely connected individual stories all have humorous moments, but taken together they lack the collective drive they might have had when the feel-good, California-style therapy McNally is satirizing was in vogue. Few things are as stale as yesterday's fads, and the result is that, as a spoof, "Dunelawn" is a distant echo.

That unplugged feeling is furthered by McNally's decision to update some cultural references but not others. Madonna and Sean Penn are referred to, and so is Senor Wences. (And how many people remember Nina Foch, who is the subject of a very funny line?). The second piece of the evening, "Ravenswood," is quite a bit less amusing.

In John Lee Beatty's witty set design, the happy round trees of "Dunelawn" have been turned into somber square ones at the sanitarium across the lake, where the prescribed treatment is behavior modification.

The benign-looking Dr. Toynbee (Cromwell) speaks in incomprehensible baby talk to his adoring patients, who have come to Ravenswood to be straitjacketed and drugged as a cure for such things as smoking.

The repetitive treatment, to a succession of not especially amusing subjects, is administered by rigid, repressed Nurse Benson (Nelligan), who yearns for the lost love of her life, Hugh Gumbs. The arrival at the sanitarium of the wretched Gumbs, in the form of the irrepressible Lane, injects badly needed comic energy into the otherwise labored piece, which perhaps needed to be administered to an audience right after the shock of "A Clockwork Orange" to be effective.

"Bad Habits," which has been given a typically superb Manhattan Theater Club production, has enough pungent McNally observations, familiar from such later, better comedies as "It's Only a Play" and "The Lisbon Traviata", to provide a fairly enjoyable evening, if not a very provocative one.

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