Sick Souls

By T. E. Kalem

LYDIE BREEZE by John Guare

This play is like a tree without a trunk. There are some vivid autumn leaves of imagery. There are gnarled branches of symbolism. Amid the gothic dry rot, the sap of humor and literacy occasionally flows. But Lydie Breeze is not rooted in anything plausible and does not grow toward anything illuminating.

This tale of a haunted house and sick souls spends its energy laboriously un-burying the past. It is 1895 in Nantucket. Years before, Lydie Hickman had hanged herself from the rafters of the weather-beaten family home. Her husband Joshua (Josef Sommer) had shot her lover, Dan Grady, to death. Grady had infected Lydie with syphilis and apparently sired her younger daughter, Lydie Breeze (Cynthia Nixon). The elder daughter, Gussie (Madeleine Potter), has become secretary-mistress to an influential Senator who is on William Randolph Hearst's yacht, anchored just off the island. The publishing tycoon and his crony are cooking up the Spanish-American War--which might have launched a better play.

Dan Grady's legitimate son Jeremiah (Ben Cross) arrives bent on murdering his father's killer. All he achieves is a successful suicide pact with the Hickman family maid Beaty (Roberta Maxwell), to whom he had transmitted syphilis. Even Ibsen might have found this a bit much.

John Guare intends some sort of allegory on the deadly infection of greedy materialism in the U.S. psyche. Louis Malle, who collaborated with Guare on the film Atlantic City, draws impeccable performances from his cast. Still, his New York theater debut might have been lustrous if he had not cast a blind eye on the script. --By T.E. Kalem

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