True Minds That Don't Meet A.r.

By RICHARD CORLISS

In his 1968 Journal, John Cheever wrote, "I dream a movie in full color. It begins on a deceptively decorous note and then moves gradually into a bloody Bedouin war. The audience is rapt until the Bedouins leave the screen and behead all those in the front row. 'Why, it's real!' the survivors scream as they run into the street."

Take that dream down a couple of notches, and you have the desired effect of A Cheever Evening, a series of sketches fashioned from Cheever stories by A.R. Gurney, now at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. It begins with cocktail chatter set to such nostalgic tunes as You'll Never Know and Moonglow, then flares into the peculiarly middle-class ugliness of verbal violence, rancor and self-pity. By the end, audiences should be thinking that the window through which they have seen the sins of the junior executive class is a mirror into their own messy hearts.

Gurney, a chronicler of gentility and Waspishness in such dapper plays as The Dining Room, The Middle Ages and Love Letters, would seem just the fellow for the job. And his sextet of reliable actors -- John Cunningham, Jack Gilpin, Julie Hagerty, Mary Beth Peil, Robert Stanton and Jennifer Van Dyck -- shifts from one role to another as smartly as commuters leaping from the Stamford express to the Cos Cob local. But as directed by Playwrights boss Don Scardino, the evening is a failure. It ransacks the canon for easy laughs and outbursts. With only a few minutes devoted to each story, the characters rarely rise above caricature.

This is death to Cheever, whose nobility as a writer was in saving his characters from stereotype; he elevated the trials of those gray-flannel souls to a kind of sanctified anguish. He saw them from the inside. And because he was a sensualist in describing people who thought it their sad destiny to be prim, Cheever was able to create a kind of lyric poetry about the things he loved: the forced intimacy of Manhattan foot traffic, a beach house at midnight, the fidelity in a cocker spaniel's tilted glance, the tenseness in a young wife's posture, the sweet-and-sour scents of rosemary and rue, the pulse of lust beneath a Republican vest.

So Cheever is our little Chekhov; like ragtime, he should be played slowly. The elegance and pain in his work need to be discovered gradually, like the bruised beauty of a sunset. These actors do get the shouting scenes right; their abrupt, strangulated outbursts are appropriate to people who have been bred to optimism and implosion, not to the articulation of rage. And Van Dyck finds wit and poignancy in her several roles. She often has the taut stillness of a woman listening for catastrophe. But the rest of the cast often pushes too hard. Any overacting brutalizes Cheever's prose; mugging is the artistic equivalent of a mugging.

In his diary Cheever wrote a prayer: "Oh, to be so much better a man than I happen to be." A requiem might be said over this Evening. What should have been the meeting of true minds -- Cheever's and Gurney's -- is only the conscientious trivializing of a major writer.