Violence and Affection Precious Sons

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Some young women seem to believe that female self-assertion was invented around 1960. But in bygone times, plenty of housebound wives and mothers found ways to control their destinies, often while cannily seeming to submit to the menfolk. That is what happens with mounting clarity and power in Precious Sons, a rousing, historically apt and splendidly played family comedy that opened on Broadway last week.

The time is June 1949, and the place is Chicago's South Side. The characters are the combative, loving members of a middle-class family who are barely hanging on; a strong wind could blow them into the lower class. The issues being debated, mostly over meals, are whether the father (Ed Harris) should take a job out of town, whether the elder son (William O'Leary) should go to college or start adult life, and whether the younger (Anthony Rapp), a child actor, should enter an elite high school or embark on a national tour. (In one of Playwright Furth's slyer jokes, the unnamed play the boy is invited to join is recognizably A Streetcar Named Desire.) The father, who lacks a high school diploma, harangues his family about education and ambition. The mother (Judith Ivey) wants her children to choose for themselves. He makes his points with force; she wins hers with guile. Precious Sons resembles a "well-made play," much like those William Inge wrote, except that Furth emphasizes reconciliation and renewal rather than catharsis.

As is often the case with well-made plays, Precious Sons is not made quite well enough. Some of its incidents seem unlikely, and its cheery ending is a rather facile reversal. But Furth creates convincing people: he gives them clever, well-wrought and wholly plausible dialogue; and he appreciates the timeless give-and-take of family life, its perilous candor and its resilience. The play evokes the temper and flavor of the years just after World War II, when economic change was the order of the day. The father went to work at a time when men could climb the corporate ladder on raw ability. Now nearing 40, he sees the G.I. Bill breeding a generation of credentialed newcomers to dislodge him from his modest perch. That is why he rests his hopes so crushingly on his precious sons, and why he alone has a sense of the tragedy that could follow their flights to freedom.

Movie Star Harris (The Right Stuff, Places in the Heart) finds simmering violence and sudden affection in this man. O'Leary foretokens a sad future when he naively envisions an assembly line as an exhibition hall for his competitive drive and skill. As the youth, Rapp makes the stage glow in what could have been a formulaic speech about his having yearned to be an actor even before he knew that the profession existed. The finest performance is Ivey's as the play's forceful center, the clangy-voiced, flighty, phrase- turning mother with a heart of gold and a will of molybdenum. She always gets her way. Perhaps the best measure of the play's impact is that audiences depart eagerly debating whether she was right.