TWIN TERRORS

By Richard Zoglin

Does serious drama still have a place on Broadway? The season just drawing to a close was hardly encouraging. Musicals like Rent and Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk generated most of the excitement. The few straight plays that succeeded at the box office typically boasted either a big star name--Carol Burnett in the lame farce Moon over Buffalo--or a flamboyant star turn--Zoe Caldwell as rampaging diva Maria Callas in Terrence McNally's Master Class.

Edward Albee and Sam Shepard came of age in an era when playwrights could be stars too. Albee's excoriating family drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shook Broadway out of its comfy seats in 1962 and established him as the premier American playwright of the post-Arthur Miller generation. Shepard (though his work has largely been ignored by Broadway until now) was the most acclaimed and charismatic playwright to emerge off-Broadway in the 1960s and '70s (The Tooth of Crime, Curse of the Starving Class). Now both authors are being celebrated with Broadway revivals of Pulitzer-prizewinning works from their most fertile periods. The two plays, which picked up 12 Tony nominations between them last week, remind us that old-fashioned stage virtues--originality of voice, depth of feeling, richness of language--can still provide a thrill.

A Delicate Balance opened on Broadway in 1966, four years after Virginia Woolf; it's a slimmer, more mysterious work. Tobias and Agnes are a middle-aged couple whose orderly suburban lives are shaken one evening by the arrival of their old friends Harry and Edna. The visitors have fled their home to escape some nameless fear. It soon appears that they plan to move in.

That's pretty much the plot, which may strike you as either a maddeningly elusive tale or a haunting parable of disconnection and existential terror. Gerald Gutierrez's tight, tense direction makes a good case for the latter. So do actors like Rosemary Harris and George Grizzard, who seem to have lived in their roles for years (only Elaine Stritch, as Agnes' boozy sister, betrays a bit of Broadway shtick). When Grizzard drops his air of befuddled decorum for a climactic aria of rage and resolve ("I want your plague! You've got some terror with you? Bring it in! Bring it in!!"), the heart freezes.

In Sam Shepard's dramas of blasted American lives, the terror never stays so politely out of sight--it's usually smacking you in the face. Buried Child, first produced in 1978, opens with a marital conversation conducted across a chasm. Dodge, a foghorn-voiced geezer (a hilarious James Gammon), sits nearly immobile on a couch, exchanging shouts with his wife (Lois Smith), who spends most of the first act offstage. One grown son (Terry Kinney) shuffles in and out with armfuls of corn; another (Leo Burmester) stomps around on a false leg and terrorizes his father by snipping his hair while he sleeps. "You think just because people propagate, they have to love their offspring?" asks Dodge. Not this crew, for sure.

For all its nuttiness--and Buried Child has more laughs than anything else on Broadway this season--the play has a familiar dramatic structure. Two outsiders, the couple's grandson and his girlfriend, show up, and a sordid family secret is revealed. Buried Child may be Shepard's most coherent and chilling dissection of the American family. Director Gary Sinise's feral production hits just the right pitch--high, but not over the top. The Tony voters fudged a bit when they nominated Buried Child for best new play (Shepard has done some cutting and rewriting). But this season, who can complain?

--By Richard Zoglin