By SYLVIE DRAKE, Times Theater Writer

The most uncommon aspect of Simon Gray's extraordinary play "The Common Pursuit" is its unabashed, faintly anachronistic pursuit of literacy. We are so bombarded by electronic images and so mired in monosyllabic exchanges that the power that springs from a play steeped in intelligence and real language becomes thoroughly intoxicating.

And that's just one of "The Common Pursuit's" many virtues. How about discernible structure? Wit? And interesting relationships -- not only between lovers, but between friend and friend?

These are at the heart of what is Gray's most human, fascinating and subtle play to date: an excoriating, funny yet moving account of a group of university chums engaged in putting out a literary magazine, and whose lives, over a 20-year period, remain inextricably connected.

The edition of the play currently enjoying acclaim at Off-Broadway's Promenade Theatre was 90% realized during a six-week residency at Los Angeles' Matrix Theatre last winter. In New York, Gray (assisted by Michael Maguire) has replaced the original director, Sam Weisman, but has not so much changed the Matrix/Weisman staging as slightly rearranged it.

Case in point: He has truncated the opening scene, now making its original second half a coda to the play. This, like more minor adjustments perceivable throughout, has merely strengthened and refined what was already heady drama.

Three members of the Los Angeles company have continued in their roles (Kristoffer) Tabori, Judy Geeson, Dylan Baker), three others are new (Michael Countryman, Peter Friedman, Nathan Lane). All are excellent. And designer David Jenkins' different series of "rooms" are just abstracted enough to take us out of a humdrum field of reality while still serving the play well.

The academic world and its baroque reverberations are a favorite context of Gray's, here as much as in his other plays such as "Butley," "Otherwise Engaged" and "Quartermaine's Terms." But he has rarely before achieved the sharpness and complexity that he gives us in "The Common Pursuit."

It is a small diamond of a play, whose various characters are its facets and absorb one another's light only to more brilliantly -- and humanly -- reflect it.

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