A Ghost Sonata in Sitcom Land Home Front

By RICHARD CORLISS

Are these the Cleavers or the Bunkers, this family of four preparing for an ordinary Thanksgiving in 1973? There's Dad (Carroll O'Connor), screwing himself into his easy chair, deflecting harsh words and harder responsibilities. Mom (Frances Sternhagen) is patrolling the house in her robe and bunny snood, calling "Wakey uppy! Wakey uppy!" in the tinny cascades of Texas motherhood. Sis (Linda Cook) is chatting on the phone with her boyfriend and threatening to "devote my entire life to crisis counseling for the holiday-impaired. My mother can be the poster child." And young Jeremy (Christopher Fields), just back from the war, slouches about like a lost soul. On closer inspection, though, this engaging sitcom quartet reveals affinities to more tortured theatrical families: O'Neill's Tyrones, Miller's Lomans, the ravaging couples in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Jeremy really has lost his soul, lost it for good and all, in the jungles of Viet Nam.

Nobody mentions it, but this funny and harrowing play takes place in a Dallas suburb on the tenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. The coincidence of dates sends Home Front aloft toward political metaphor. Dad may be every "reasonable" statesman who led the U.S. deeper into Viet Nam; Mom and Sis could be every uncommitted American woman, worried sick about her boy or her beau, but hoping against all evidence for the best. And Jeremy may not be kidding when he says that in Viet Nam "I died." Alive or dead, he is the twisted ghost of every Camelot ideal. This good boy went off to war; now he has returned, the hunter haunted, to turn Thanksgiving dinner into a deathday party for all domestic illusions.

In its final, fatal moments, Home Front goes as berserk as Jeremy, waving a handgun of political didacticism at the audience, turning the American homestead into a Freudian minefield. Here Jeremy is less the middle class's guilty secret than, in his sister's words, "a terminal jerk"; and Dad must expose himself as a paranoiac patriarch whose home is his castle, moated by ignorance. For the two hours preceding this pirouette into psychodrama, Home Front is fiercely sympathetic to all of its characters. Beneath Mom's lyrical ditsiness and Dad's clumsy evasions are two frightened people who care, beyond words, for their son. But because Jeremy's rage is beyond their comprehension, they can only stand by, then stand firm, as the boy plays out his nightmare.

Home Front was first staged last June in London, starring Sternhagen and under the direction of Michael Attenborough. Both repeat their roles in the excellent Broadway production that opened last week. One might expect O'Connor (as a milder Archie Bunker) or Fields (in a part that cries out for an actor with the implosive intensity of a Sean Penn) to commandeer the spotlight. But Home Front is Sternhagen's show, allowing her to nail down, with an increasingly desperate comic urgency, the suburban matriarch. This mom will not be accused of screaming at her children: "I was using my loud voice." Instead she will display a compulsion for propriety at all costs. "Let's not talk about it any more," she exclaims. "It's a holiday!" And on holiday, Sternhagen's trill ascends to a wail, and she practically flutters into orbit over her brood.

Until Home Front runs aground in the Big Muddy of significance, it is the Broadway season's finest new play. James Duff is only 29, and this is his first full-length work, but he has tunneled under the skins of these solid folks to create a sitcom as ghost sonata--a comedy of manners, and a play that matters.