New Play in Manhattan

Sunday Breakfast (by Emery Rubio & Miriam Balf) brought one of the weakest theatrical seasons in living memory to a rather respectable close. Though an inexpert play, and less a play than a picture, this American National Theater & Academy offering is veined with honest purpose and streaked with effective observation. A study of a family, it portrays the frazzled emotions and jangled nerves, the inner gnawing that makes for outward nagging, of lives lived under constant pressure. A harassed jeweler (Anthony Ross) lives over his shop with his long-suffering, short-tempered wife (Margaret Feury). Their son won't take a job in the shop and can't keep a job elsewhere; their grown daughter can only have stylish dates on sluttish terms; their neglected, bewildered eight-year-old runs away.

Her flight precipitates enough of a crisis for the father to vow a new family existence. There is a festive Sunday breakfast, much talk of a fine vacation. But for all the promises, the future doesn't look promising; the worm that seems to turn is still a leopard cursed with his spots. It is a chronicle of countless families whose struggle is less for bread than for something more than bread, and who are riot 1 ^o callous to love, but too burdened. If not successful, Sunday Breakfast is generally interesting and fitfully touching. One big difficulty is that it deals with a condition rather than a specific situation, and can only grind away at what is quickly apparent and largely unalterable. Themselves beset by their material, the authors get as overwrought as their characters; they lose perspective about something that, treated more casually, might seem more heartbreaking. But however uneven, Sunday Breakfast is at least not slick.

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