Even when she gets preachy, Groff writes sharp, vertiginous dialogue and toys teasingly with theatrical form, and Eustis' fleet-footed, gently swinging production matches her steps like an expert dance partner. Eugene Lee's modular set ingeniously reminds us how close a sound stage is to a theater, (or is that vice versa?), and costumer Deborah Newhall comes up with some dapper period threads. The Aaron Copland instrumentals that boom through some of the early scene changes are bold and resonant choice, artfully preparing us for the myth-making italics and winking quotation marks with which Ruby's story will be told by evening's end.

Groff and Eustis have a lot of fun, maybe too much, with the conventions of the showbiz backstager. Outsized figures like the vulgarian Marcus, whom Masur gives red-faced heft and a waddling swagger, or a diva character actress played with deep-dish tang by Scurria, work well as comic relief, less well as voices of conscience. Marcus' tossed-off pronouncement, "Television is Latin for 'simple story,' " feels just right. But there's a little too much authorial nudging behind the scene in which Scurria's diva, trying to convince idealistic Lulu to fight the capitalist beast from within its belly, offers the rhetorical question: "What's so bad about better?"

The sportive but probing banter between Lulu and Tad, deftly played by Siff and Harner, somehow evokes Sunset Blvd.'s unequally yoked Joe Gillis and Betty Schaefer. Here, though, it's television, not Hollywood, that is the succubus/seducer of artists and idealists, and Groff's view of the transaction is more ambivalent, less toxic--more Paddy Chayefsky than Billy Wilder. "We'll keep knocking on that glass screen until they sober up and get it," Lulu concludes. That's an admirably unfashionable mission statement in an age of "branded entertainment." And while I may not watch a network that Lulu programmed, Groff's work is well worth a tune-in.

The Ruby Sunrise
By Rinne Groff
Directed by Oskar Eustis
Public Theater