Cold Fire

That Summer--That Fall, by Frank D. Gilroy. Fate is a fury, and it cannot be dramatically served at room temperature. Like meteors, the heroes and heroines of tragedy consume themselves in flaming arcs of passion as they streak across the night sky of destiny. Playwright Gilroy (The Subject Was Roses) has had the dubious inspiration to modernize the Phaedra plot of Euripides and Racine and play it cool. His drama is as incendiary as a wet match head.

A paunchy, middle-aged Italian restaurant owner (Richard Castellano) discovers that he has an illegitimate son from a long-past liaison. The boy (Jon Voight) is 22, a blond sunburst who looks as if he had spent an eternity on a tennis court. The father breaks the news to his wife by bringing the son home for a visit. The wife (Irene Papas) is a moody, olive-dark, childless woman of 36 who has been pacing her life like a tiger in a cage of desire. Unable to restrain herself, she kisses the youth. When he spurns her ("Get yourself another boy") she takes despairing revenge in suicide. The boy is later killed in a car crash.

Laconic to the point of taciturnity, Playwright Gilroy seems to have performed a sort of Pinterectomy on his dialogue without Pinter's flair for making silence crackle. The cast underplays to the point of emotional invisibility, a particular waste in the case of Irene Papas. There are 2,500 years of tragic tradition structured in her Greek face, and as her film Electra showed, she could steal the fire of Olympus and set Broadway ablaze.

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