Fearlessly Offbeat

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Maybe the best way to evoke the odd and intriguing flavor of The Loman Family Picnic is to recount the ending -- or rather, endings. After throwing a bar mitzvah way beyond the budget of his blue-collar Brooklyn family, the father (Peter Friedman of TV's Brooklyn Bridge) storms out in rage at being unappreciated, his son's wad of cash gifts stuck precariously in his back pocket. He returns hours later, explaining that he has been watching the "dumb" movie Born Free. In one variation, his bored wife (two-time Tony Award winner Christine Baranski) chucks him out. In another, she commits suicide by leaping off the tacky flat's tiny balcony. In a third, their children join her in denouncing him. In the last -- the quietest, most real and yet, one feels, the most tragic -- he settles down at the table to eat yet another loathed diet meal of water-packed tuna as his wife sits opposite, each stuck in the nightly silence of despair.

This bit of surrealism is, however, only one of the fey charms of the work, which opened off-Broadway last week. Playwright Donald Margulies, a 1992 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Sight Unseen, is, as usual, absolutely fearless in going for the offbeat. A long-dead aunt, for example, returns to life by climbing in a 10th-story window. The title refers to the wackiest moment, an imagined new scene for Death of a Salesman, which the precocious younger son envisions adapting as a perky Broadway musical. Arthur Miller, after all, came from the neighborhood, and the boy's parents seem crazier than Miller's Lomans. What better escape for both households than song and dance? If neither as funny nor as painful as it could be, this Picnic is still a satisfying meal. -- W.A.H. III