Paralyzed by Caution

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: LATER LIFE

AUTHOR: A.R. GURNEY

WHERE: OFF-BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: A wistful comedy suggests that the biggest emotional risk is trying to avoid emotional risks.

Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? The question is not exactly new, but it has rarely been posed more deftly and disarmingly than in the 21st work of the wistful comedist A.R. Gurney, whose best previous plays (Sweet Sue, Love Letters) also centered on the disruptive consequences of love unpursued. Gurney is often pegged as an elegist for the waning Wasp. In Later Life he makes great efforts to usher in characters outside that stereotype. They are Irish, Jewish, Texan and techno-nerd; one woman is a lesbian, one man gay, and these two fully transcend sketch comedy to offer poignant glimpses of self-destructive lives. Predictably, however, the central figure is a Wasp, and an uptight one at that.

Charles Kimbrough, who plays the painfully stiff anchorman Jim Dial on the TV sitcom Murphy Brown, makes this performance subtler and deeper and eschews the trademark grimaces of someone who has just smelled something foul. The action unfolds during a cocktail party where he meets, courts, wins and loses a woman (the incandescent Maureen Anderman) whom he knew three decades before. The youthful infatuation ended with her offering herself and his declining, not out of prudishness but from a lifelong premonition that something terrible was going to happen and from a courtly determination not to have anyone share his doom.

By the end of the party, he senses that "something terrible" actually did befall him: the paralyzing fear of risk that made his outwardly orderly life an emotional wasteland. It paralyzes him again, at the moment when his second- chance love is deciding whether to return to an abusive husband. Kimbrough, ever the gentleman, remains to comfort others: a female friend grieving over widowhood and a gay male stranger sobbing over a lost lover and a dead dog. They have known love and pain and embrace both. He keeps life at handshake distance -- every life, even his own.