Failing Words

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

HURLYBURLY by David Rabe

Eddie (William Hurt) has a desperate urge to make connections. "I don't know what pertains to me," he cries, striving to locate defining links between himself and the world as he feverishly scans the political news in the paper or tries to make sense of the post-Freudian gabble of his friends. Distracted, he abuses emotional ties that are so close at hand he could touch them were he only to reach out. His best friends have simplified these problems: tough Phil (Harvey Keitel) makes most of his conjunctions with his fists; Artie (Jerry Stiller) is hooked into the only thing that matters to him, his career, via his answering machine; Mickey (Christopher Walken) simply accepts the ad hoc life. For him all liaisons are intrinsically temporary, and cynicism, laced with drugs, is his sustenance.

The four live in Los Angeles and work on the fringe of show business. But David Rabe's Hurlyburly, which opened at the Promenade Theater off-Broadway last week, is a great deal more than just another satire of the Southern California lifestyle. Rabe's characters would essentially be what they are no matter where they lived or worked. As he sees it, there is a limbo of the lost through which American males of a certain age and status almost inevitably must pass these days. Divorced, not loving their abandoned children as much as they loathe their former wives, directing a combination of need and hostility toward the women who drift in and out of their new lives, they are, as Mickey puts it, "involved in a variety of pharmaceutical experiments," which, as Eddie completes the thought, "test the American dream of oblivion." Another way of putting it is that their lives are full of incident and devoid of coherence.

Artie brings home a girl (Cynthia Nixon) as a "care package" for his friends. "She worked the last time I tried her," he explains. Eddie and Mickey already share a woman (Sigourney Weaver, whose striking physical presence provides a marvelous ironic contrast to her dithering sensibility). Phil steals his own child, beats up a bubble dancer (Judith Ivey) and finally kills himself. At the end, Eddie is frantically leafing through the dictionary, hoping to find in his pal's suicide note an anagram that will reveal the meaning in an apparently meaningless act.

In the anguish of that search lies the profundity of Rabe's work. The playwright is functioning here as far more than a realist with an unsurpassed ear for contemporary speech. What he is saying, finally, is that words have begun to fail. The vocabulary in which his people speak, a jargon derived from televised reductions of reality and popularized psychology, leaves them without the tools they need to know their own minds, let alone the complexities of their shared existence. The bitterest of the many laughs Rabe provides derives from his recognition that the relentless articulateness of his people is only a higher form of inarticulateness.

Since his subject is language, he is obliged to define his characters through the rhythms of their speech, and he rises superbly to that most difficult of playwright's challenges. In testing himself, he is testing audiences as well. Usually plays about language call flashy attention to what they are doing. Rabe requires us to understand that when he is examining cliches he is not endorsing them. As with language, so with morality. The sympathy he feels for his mystified characters is not to be understood as approval.

The actors form a flawless ensemble. Hurt, who bears the heaviest weight of words, and Walken, whose character has the softest edges, deserve particular praise. Director Mike Nichols has imposed a shaping dramatic tension on shapeless lives and on a play that is of necessity loosely structured. His uncanny sense of modern body language brilliantly matches Rabe's sensitivity to verbal gestures. Everyone involved in Hurlyburly (including all its designers) have stared hard, long and with compassionate intelligence into the face of contemporary banality, and found ways of transcending it without falsifying. Theirs is an important work, masterly accomplished. --By Richard Schickel