Double

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The curtain goes up to reveal Mary Tyler Moore sketching a naked young man. She plays a woman not unlike herself, a greeting-card artist seeking to outgrow a Goody Two-Shoes image in her work and life. The youth she is drawing -- or maybe only imagines she is drawing -- is her son's Dartmouth roommate. He is compact and dark. Or lanky and blond. Two actors, John K. Linton and Barry Tubb, have the role but do not alternate: they are often onstage at the same time, embodying different aspects of the character. For that matter, Moore is not alone either: much of the time, Lynn Redgrave is alongside, sharing the character, occasionally compelling the youth to speak to both of them at once.

Is this quirky storytelling device meant to lend intellectual gloss to an apparently slight tale? Is Playwright A.R. Gurney Jr., whose works (The Dining Room, The Perfect Party) are often short on incident but long on sly allusion and will-o'-the-wisp charm, once again slipping away from consummation of a plot? Beneath the winsome comedy, Gurney is playing with the Whitmanesque notion that each man contains multitudes. When the two Sues contemplate a nude sketch of the boy -- all that lingers from the maybe affair -- what they term "very good" is not just his lithe body or their rendering but the feeling of being finally at peace within one's own mind, that house of many mansions. For an artist and perhaps for everyone, Gurney implies, building a relationship with oneself is at least as crucial -- and as complex -- as coming to terms with the world.

Director John Tillinger evokes fine performances: Moore has never been ; better. This is the play Gurney's fans have been waiting for him to write, funny and inventive but also bravely expansive in scope. Gurney once described his comic gift as "dancing in chains." In Sweet Sue he breaks free. -- W.A.H.II