The three-person play, opening tonight at the State Theater, features one actor who is returning to the stage after being sidelined by a torn aorta and one for whom the expression "break a leg" might hit a little too close to home from now on.

The play itself is a comedy -- about two friends searching for the ideal woman -- and that suits David Wright just fine.

Wright of Tacoma has an obvious flair for comedy. While he now has a Dacron sleeve replacing 8 inches of his aorta, his sense of humor is intact.

"I saw the sleeve. It's kind of exciting," he quipped. "It has two racing stripes on it."

He added, "As I have learned this year, dying is easy; comedy is hard." And that famous deathbed line is a pretty appropriate one for Wright.

The tear occurred while Wright was onstage at the State Theater in Harlequin's production of "Hamlet."

"I was playing Polonius, and Hamlet had just killed me," he said. "I was just lying there on the stage, and I felt this really tremendous pain. I immediately went into shock and started sweating, and all I could do was lie there and hope that the other actors were moving along with the scene so that when Hamlet dragged me out, I could deal with it."

After lying down offstage, Wright began to feel just a little better, and he had two more roles in the play.

"I've done theater for a long time," he said, "and the idea that 'the show must go on' is very strong. It really is. It is something I believe in."

He managed to finish the show and then headed for Providence St. Peter Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a small tear in his aorta, right over the heart. Because doing surgery in that location is so dangerous, doctors opted not to operate.

Wright's condition stabilized, and he was discharged after two weeks in the hospital. Just a few days after that, however, he was feeling much worse, so he went to St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, where, a few days later, his aorta tore all the way.

"I sat up in bed and said, 'I don't feel very well,' and that's when it tore the rest of the way," Wright said. "I was incredibly fortunate that I was in the hospital. ... If I had been anyplace else -- at home, at the theater -- I would have been dead. There just wouldn't have been time.

"I think this is the same thing that happened to John Ritter," Wright added, "and he was unfortunate enough not to be in a hospital, and he just bled out."

Wright got a lot of support from friends, family and fans of his acting, and he feels grateful to be alive. He's feeling almost back to normal, he said, although a nerve was damaged during surgery, leaving his left vocal cord nonfunctional -- a big concern for an actor. The vocal cord's function might return, doctors have told him, but meanwhile, foam has been injected into the cord to stiffen it and allow him to speak, albeit in a different voice.

The brush with death has changed Wright's perspective, but not his love of the theater.

"It makes you reflective," he said. "You start realizing that there are fewer days ahead than there are behind. I just hope to use the time that I have wisely, to try to do some good in life.

"I think the theater is incredibly important -- I've thought that since I was a teenager -- and I just want to do the best job I possibly can."

That's true whether he's doing Shakespeare or a comedy like "The Love List."

"It's funny," he said. "People will laugh. Laughter really is a great medicine and is good for the soul. ... This will be a welcome respite from a lot of bad news."

"The Love List" isn't a run-of-the-mill comedy, Whitney said. "It's so funny and so consistently surprising. Here's this sort of frothy, light comedy stuff, but it's a little bit surreal. ... It gets very elemental about how men feel about women, about how women are different from men."

As for Steve Manning, he of the broken leg, his incident seems minor by comparison.

Wright demurred, though. "I think Steve had a much more fun adventure," he said. "It involved swinging and ropes and pirates. I just laid around."

As the follow-up to "Hamlet," Harlequin staged "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," using many of the same actors. (Wright, of course, was unavailable.) Manning was to play Claudius again -- and he also was set to do the role of the pirate captain in the big fight.

"At the first rehearsal, Steve had this great idea that he wanted to swing in on a rope like Hamlet," Whitney recalls. "He swung out, and it was a big swing. He couldn't hang on and just went like a bullet into the front row of the auditorium and broke his leg in five places. So he was out of the picture for a while as well."

But he's back on both feet now. The timing for both actors' returns couldn't have been better, Whitney said.

"From the first page, I just loved it," he said of the play. "And within the first two pages, I knew exactly who the two guys were. They just had to be David Wright and Steve Manning."

Co-star Mari Nelson, who plays the ideal woman, has been luckier on stage. "Mari hasn't had a brush with death or even come close," Whitney said.

But just to be on the safe side, perhaps no one should suggest she break a leg, either.

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