Beguiling Visions RECKLESS

A woman lies in bed listening to Christmas songs, crooning to her husband about their children. Abruptly he leaps from her side, explains that he has hired a hit man to kill her and regrets the action, but that it is too late for her to do anything except flee. This does not make much sense, nor will most of what happens to the woman during the next two hours onstage, yet bolt she does. So begins what seems to be a years-long trek that brings her into contact with tacky game shows, corrupt charities, alcoholic despondency and mass murder-though it may be only a dream or therapeutic fantasy.

What matters in this new off-Broadway collaboration by writer Craig Lucas and director Norman Rene (Three Postcards) is not the literal truth but the beguilingly hallucinatory fashion in which one vision blends into another. In an age when absurdism is yesteryear's avant-garde, a handful of American playwrights work this rowdy territory. Only Lucas and Rene understand how to make something beautiful out of a dream walking.