Bowing Out with a Flourish

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

APPROACHING ZANZIBAR

by Tina Howe

A vacationing family meets a boy in the Blue Ridge Mountains willing to take a group snapshot. He turns out to be a deaf-mute astrological visionary. High up in the Smokies, the menopausal mother of the family keeps hearing a baby crying out in the woods. After she leaves the tent, the audience hears it too. The family tumbles into its car outside a diner near Amarillo, Texas, and resumes squabbling, only this time father and daughter swap roles and accustomed dialogue, and so do mother and son. The elders squeak about needing a bathroom break. The children trade curses about whose bad idea this adventure was, anyway. Then they screech off into the night, ostensibly with a grade-schooler in command of the steering wheel.

As the family huddles around the Taos, N. Mex., bedside of an aged aunt to hear her final addled reverie of childhood, the dying woman whisks off a grizzled wig to reveal blond locks, sits bolt upright and brays delightedly at having sneaked in one last prank. At the sight of this transformation, the daughter's attitude shifts from terror to wonder. Moments later, she and the dying woman are jumping on the bed as though it were a trampoline, mingling the old one's romantic memories with the child's geography game in exultant shouts of "Zanzibar! Zanzibar!"

What do these increasingly fantastical scenes mean? The audience may never be quite sure, but one thing is certain: playwright Tina Howe, overpraised in the past for her wan Wasp tone poems (Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances), has infused new energy into her work. At the same time, she has sustained her gift for hinting at profound meanings in humdrum moments. To Howe, the eternal in life is clearest in its ephemerality; the memories that haunt us to the end of our days are of the most ordinary, and thus revealing, events.

Howe has always had an ear for plausible conversation and a keen eye for the elegiac beauty of the everyday. Blending them with the subtly magical in Approaching Zanzibar at last relieves her work of a seeming pettiness and dullness. In the production that opened off-Broadway last week, she is aided by a superb cast, including Jane Alexander and Harris Yulin as the parents and Bethel Leslie as the dying aunt -- all established stars who delicately avoid star turns -- and the exceptional Clayton Barclay Jones and Angela Goethals as the children. Heidi Landesman's brilliantly simple sets fill a postage-stamp stage with bits of cloth to create a mountain, a river, a campsite and a twinkling night sky, capturing not physical essence but distilled recollection. The entire event is ethereal yet spellbinding.

ARISTOCRATS

by Brian Friel

Social standing is always relative. To the hardscrabble peasants down in the Irish village of Ballybeg, the clan in the big house on the hill is the nobility. But at Ballybeg Hall the members of that gilded tribe are keenly aware of a wider world and their piddling place in it. They glamourize the past: a tatty cushion or tarnished candlestick becomes an heirloom by reason of a (probably fictitious) anecdotal link to some bygone celebrity. They embroider the dismal present. They deny the looming future of dissolution and dispersal.

If all this sounds like the umpteenth rewrite of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, the best defense Brian Friel might offer for his superb play, now off-Broadway, is that his characters seem Chekhovian only because they are so candid and self-aware. Kaiulani Lee is the older sister who sacrificed by staying home to tend to her father, Haviland Morris the sister who opted to marry for money, Margaret Colin the one who drowned herself in the Molotov cocktail of alcohol laced with utter honesty. John Pankow excels as the village lad who romanced each girl in turn, settled for the one who would have him, and went on to a diplomatic career that eclipses the golden clan's luster in every mind but the one that counts: his own.

Against these plangent strings of personality is the oboe howl and twitter of Niall Buggy as the only son, a pixilated and desperate man steeped in family lore who nonetheless bolted half a continent away. For him and his kin, heritage is a cruel joke masquerading as an oracle.

LARGELY NEW YORK

by Bill Irwin

Performance artist. New vaudevillian. Silent clown. However you label limber-jointed Bill Irwin, he is one of the most winsome presences in the American theater. In the sketchbook Largely New York, which opened on Broadway last week, he wears a top hat and spectacles, carries a white cane and resembles an elongated Jiminy Cricket. All around him are people he might befriend, if only he could break through their obsessive isolation with entertainment machines -- a Walkman, a boom box, a video camera, a TV monitor. Irwin himself carries a remote control, purportedly hooked up to the tiers of curtains onstage and the sound system that sporadically blares Tea for Two while he attempts a soft-shoe.

Not much happens during these 70 sweetly silly minutes: pratfalls and swan dives, break dancers accosted, a girl lost and maybe won. Some technology- ( inspired images are new -- Irwin silently screams from inside a TV until someone vacuums up his video image and expels it into an old trunk, from which the lanky actor unfolds -- but the show owes a lot to Chaplin and Harpo, Jacques Tati and Marcel Marceau. Still, they are the people to copy, and Irwin surely has the gift.