By Linda Winer

THE LISBON TRAVIATA. Comedy / drama by Terrence McNally, directed by John Tillinger. With Anthony Heald, Nathan Lane, Dan Butler, John Slattery. Sets by Philipp Jung, costumes by Jane Greenwood, lights by Ken Billington. Presented by Manhattan Theater Club at Promenade Theater, Broadway at 76th Street, Manhattan.

IF EVER anyone needed proof of the value of new-play development in nonprofit theaters, "The Lisbon Traviata" is it.

When Terrence McNally's two-part comedy / drama opened at Manhattan Theater Club in June, the script had a scrumptious, gossipy and witty first act, but a second act that wallowed in mawkish melodrama and soap-opera histrionics. All during the brief run, McNally was obsessively reworking that second half. Depending on what day one saw the play, there was a murder or no murder, continuity between the two contrasting acts or no continuity, or stages in between.

The theater reopened the revised play at the Promenade last night, for what deserves to be a long and happy run. What a pleasure to see a time when the system actually works, when a playwright has the inclination and opportunity to fix a promising play and when a production isn't forced prematurely, by commercial deadlines, into the dustbin of missed opportunities.

So welcome to the new, improved "Lisbon Traviata," a moving and altogether satisfying look at the overlapping and conflicting functions of obsession and love. The play remains, of course, two related one-act plays. One is a delicious opera buffa, a spectacular, over-the-top, emotional bitch-fest between Mendy and Stephen (Nathan Lane and Anthony Heald), two gay opera fanatics. The other is a gritty, full-throated verismo drama about the breakup of Stephen's eight-year affair with Mike (Dan Butler), who prefers Paul (John Slattery).

The play is still two separate stories, but McNally and director John Tillinger have made them feel more like two parts of the same book. The new second act has a more realistic - and infinitely more touching - conclusion. There still are a few wincingly bathetic moments in the breakup, unfortunately, but the relationship between Stephen and Mike seems richer and their crises clearer.

We still miss Lane's Mendy, an irresistible character who drops out after the first act, but he "appears" on the answering machine three times, instead of merely once, which helps connect the scenes and keeps him close to us.

Even more important is Heald's performance as Stephen, which was superbly contained in the June version but is flashier and sharper now. The depths of his needs - for opera, for Mike - seem even more dangerous, an adjustment that connects the recreational passions of the first act with the desperate ones in the second.

The play's title comes from a 1958 Maria Callas performance in Lisbon, from which a pirate recording was made and later released commercially.

In the first act, Mendy is obsessed with the knowledge that the new album is back at Stephen and Mike's modern apartment, as is Paul.

The ever-fabulous Lane, as Mendy, is a flamboyant show-off, an extravagantly silly but needy and loving man who judges that things are "To die!" and hurls himself on the divan in his Old World apartment of mauve brocade.

Stephen is an aging prodigy, a senior editor at Knopf, one of those infuriating types who seems to know things, effortlessly, until we see him fuss too tidily with the coasters or be incapable of conversation without background music to deflect and control real confrontation.

McNally, an opera specialist, has a merciless good time dishing Tebaldi and Sills and even, gasp, Sondheim. But he also has pulled off a mainstream play that is comfortably lusty about the erotics of gay life - a play that manages both to criticize and to idolize the preoccupations of the mind, the gut and heart.

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