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"Small talk, small talk, with other thoughts going on behind." So chants a character from Noel Coward's "Shadow Play," a one-act exercise with a strangely surreal flavor from 1935. That phrase has been latched upon by certain critics as a summing up of the Coward technique: an expert deployment of frivolous chatter spread like a topcoat of meringue across dark and stormy depths.

But just what happens when the small talk stops, when the unspeakable is finally spoken? You might ask a couple of characters, two men of letters in the autumn of their lives, who were created by Coward in his later years, the central figures in the tepidly rendered diptych of plays called "Suite in Two Keys," which opened last night at the Lucille Lortel Theater.

One of these men is facing imminent death; the other, the exposure of the contaminating lie that has governed his adult life. Small talk has suddenly become a very fragile defense system.

Coward himself played these roles when both he and the 20th century were 66 years old, and the fact that the man of the velvet epigram was clearly ailing by then is said to have infused these works with a heart-stirring poignancy.

Yet in this latest version, directed by John Tillinger with Paxton Whitehead in the roles originated by Coward, the two one-acts only rarely deliver on the haunted promises of their titles: "Shadows of the Evening" and "A Song at Twilight."

The show, set in the sitting room of a Lausanne hotel suite (designed in gleaming curves of wood by James Noone), isn't excruciating. In its favor it has the ever vivacious Judith Ivey, a whiz at whipping fully detailed characterizations out of thin air, and a charmingly modest Hayley Mills, the onetime child movie star ("Pollyanna," "The Parent Trap") who is only now, at 53, making her New York stage debut.

Yet this production keeps mortal shadows pale and unthreatening, with Mr. Whitehead's interpretations usually suggesting nothing more annihilating than a nasty toothache that is dealt with, by turns, stoically and peevishly. It is the small talk, after all, that provides the show's principal diversions.

Clearly, the creators of this revival had something else in mind in pairing the one-acts as they have. "Shadows" and "Song" are part of a trio of playlets that Coward wrote, with a far more frivolous, satiric work, "Come Into the Garden, Maud," designed to alternate with "Shadows" as a companion piece to "Song." (When "Suite" first opened in New York in 1974, under the title of "Noel Coward in Two Keys," with Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy and Anne Baxter, it stuck with the "Song" and "Maud" combination.)

"Song," which was recently seen in London (by itself) in an acclaimed production starring Corin and Vanessa Redgrave, has always been the best of the set, hands down. Though etched in acidic repartee, it is an earnest work, a tale of moral reckoning for the pompous Hugo Latymer (Mr. Whitehead).

Sir Hugo is a venerated novelist with a waspish tongue, an efficient, browbeaten German secretary of a wife (Ms. Mills) and a hidden homosexual past. His former lover, Carlotta Gray (Ms. Ivey), a vain and ostensibly silly actress, shows up bearing evidence of that past, and she is determined to make the novelist, who was partly inspired by Somerset Maugham, writhe in the acknowledgment of it.

As a subject this was strong meat for Coward, whose own homosexuality was never publicly paraded. There is an implicit element of self-flagellation in the systematic needling of Sir Hugo by Carlotta that could, and should, set off shivers of vicarious discomfort in the audience.

That this doesn't happen here has everything to do with Mr. Whitehead, who plays his character on a single note of authority edged in exasperation, something this actor's booming baritone conveys effortlessly. For "Song" to shake us, however, Sir Hugo must be both an unpleasant man with a streak of elitist sadism, and a frightened one. Except for one touchingly rendered moment of collapse, Mr. Whitehead seems rather amiable and utterly self-possessed.

This throws a disproportionate burden onto Ms. Ivey, who with her strapping American persona is not an obvious choice for Carlotta. But one should never underestimate this actress's resourcefulness, and here she works minor miracles in portraying Carlotta as an aging vamp who is as capable of being wounded as of wounding.

With an accent that slides into grating affectation and a body that doesn't shy from flaunting itself in unflattering ways, Ms. Ivey finds an abrasive vulgarity in Carlotta without erasing the necessary flickers of dignity and intelligence. If only Mr. Whitehead gave her more to play against. She actually scares up more chemistry in her brief scenes with Ms. Mills, who is quite endearing in a low-key way as a Teutonic mouse that roars, in which the characters dance gently between alliance and enmity.

The two women square off more conventionally in the production's first playlet, "Shadows," with Ms. Ivey as the mistress of a terminally ill publisher (Mr. Whitehead) and Ms. Mills as the abandoned wife who has never consented to a divorce and who has now been enlisted to help him deal with his death.

The actresses again balance each other nicely, with Ms. Ivey a whirlwind of anxieties to Ms. Mills's shaky upper-middle-class sang-froid, and Mr. Whitehead's majestic, valiant poise makes more sense here. But no one overcomes the perfumed starchiness that pervades the speeches about greeting death gracefully.

Unlike "Song," "Shadows" isn't really a departure from familiar Coward formulas; it feels instead like a variation on the stiff-upper-lip sentimentality of his patriotic plays and screenplays. Oh, the brave, brittle wit of these souls in jeopardy as darkness closes in! "Shadows," at least in this interpretation, feels distressingly like a waxworks tableau.

Along with the likable but toothless Broadway production of "Waiting in the Wings," another late work by Coward, "Suite" is all the New York theater season has come up with in celebration of the centenary of the playwright's birth. This doesn't seem right. Theatergoers being thus introduced to the 20th-century's master of sophisticated comedy will wonder where on earth the bubbles are in that fabled Coward champagne.