Our leading not-for-profit theaters blur into each other in their culturally corporate way. The directors are as interchangeable as the playwrights. Today Doug Hughes, tomorrow Joe Mantello. It makes little or no difference who directs. Mr. Hughes’ production of The House in Town, which is set ominously in the first months of 1929, is over-careful, ponderous even, certainly unexciting. It is in itself anonymously generic, and, above all, it’s safe.

The stodgy staging of the play possesses no real sense of vitality or period. It’s merely stylized. The actors, though capable, are self-consciously arch and mannered (which in turn passes for a period style). We’re locked in the ersatz good taste of old-fashioned Masterpiece Theatre. And so it goes.

To break with the deadening cycle of corporate culture for the thinking classes, we need artistic directors with enough daring to shake subscribers from their dozy expectations. And we need far, far better plays than the prolific Mr. Greenberg has given us here.

Whilst it’s no secret that I’m unable to regard his scattershot work as highly as some—Mr. Brantley puts him on the pinnacle as our leading playwright with Tony Kushner—this has indeed been a bummer of a year for Mr. Greenberg. His annus horribilis began with his intended light comedy, the pretentiously titled A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, which was dismissed even by his biggest fans as stereotypical and slapdash—a TV soap about tired generation wars. Then came his fortunate alliance with Julia Roberts and the recent Broadway revival of Three Days of Rain—a box-office hit that triggered unflattering reappraisals of the early play. The House in Town is no better. It’s accidental Edwardian melodrama—a rambling, overblown domestic saga striving much too hard for significance. Some of it even stretches credulity. This is the first time I’ve heard that the habit of scratching your eyebrow is genetic. A plot twist actually hinges on it.

Mr. Greenberg’s plays are typically wordy, meandering in a form of dramatic blogging. The playwright promises the rich delights of intoxicating Stoppardian ideas, but he lacks Mr. Stoppard’s wit and talent for surface depths. The overwrought House in Town is about an unhappy, childless marriage that’s intended to serve as a metaphor for disintegrating America. But it’s all shallow and it’s all talk.

Only Mr. Greenberg could have his painfully winsome heroine, the well-bred Amy from Saratoga, announce stuff like this to her husband as if it were poetically meaningful: “Whenever I see myself happy in the future, I’m sitting down.”

Her upright husband Sam, a parvenu Jew given to staring broodily into the fireplace, responds politely that he doesn’t understand what she’s talking about. “But I love you that I don’t,” he replies, confusingly.

Is Amy nuts? I thought so, though I think Mr. Greenberg intends her to be a romantic misfit in an unfair world. But she’s more of an irritating scatterbrain who’s played by Jessica Hecht as a grim dreamer on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She sounds impressive, perhaps, with her loopy, foreboding pronouncements like, “There’s a robin redbreast in that sycamore, while someone lies maimed in your parlor.”

The play is set in a townhouse on Millionaires’ Row, on 23rd Street between Ninth and 10th avenues. Amy’s successful husband (Mark Harelik) owns a department store, and he declaims too. Here’s his opaque assessment of a visit to the theater: “The people of the play kept entering and exiting—that was to accent the horizontal …. What it was saying was that the traffic of the street had been extended through these bodies into the room. That what the modern age has given us is a drawing inside of the life of the street.”

And what exactly does that mean? It’s gibberish, another of Mr. Greenberg’s garbled, approximate thoughts meant to suggest the possibilities of the American century. But we fail to connect with his sketchy, aimless characters and his crowded checklist of token “ideas” that include random remarks on illegal abortion, political violence, social snobbery, anti-Semitism, circumcision, De Profundis and Anglophile architecture.

But all that is window-dressing. The soft, central shakiness of the play is revealed by its early descent into a melodrama masquerading as an Ibsen tragedy. Warning! I am about to reveal who’s maimed in the parlor.

Everyone is, actually—except for the abortionist’s gossipy, venal wife. There’s firstly the pro forma canard that Amy’s devoted husband, Sam, is secretly gay. The shock! The shame! (The tedium.) “It had to happen,” he says to 17-year-old Christopher, holding him tight. “It has to be like this.”

But wait! Sam isn’t gay. Nor is Christopher, an orphan whose mother was run over by a taxicab. The mother worked devotedly for Sam for many years, and Christopher is … their child! He scratches his eyebrow as Sam does, and indeed Sam’s father before him.

Meanwhile, neurotic Amy hates snow because it lacks precision and dreams of buying a country house without a view. Trouble ensues when she believes she’s become pregnant by her sexually remote husband. But in fact she’s dying of an incurable disease.

Before she kicks the bucket, however, she discovers that her husband is Christopher’s dad—when he scratches his eyebrow—and kicks him out of the house. “It’s the last phase of me,” Amy cries, bewilderingly. “It’s the version of me that’s learned a little bit. I’ve never in my life owned a single thing. My body never gave me what I asked of it; even my marriage was a sale. Now, at long last, I’m going to have something.”

“What, though?” the dim Sam asks earnestly. “What will you have?”

“My death,” she replies. “And your absence.”

A moment later, a door slams. She shuts her eyes and takes a breath. And … curtain.

But in December, the celebrity buyers and the building's other prominent owners (including NBC Universal president Michael Jackson and William Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems) awoke to the sounds of construction beginning on a third Richard Meier tower, next door to the southern tower.

The new building, at 165 Charles Street, is set to be completed in March 2005. And when it is, the southern views from 176 Perry Street's expansive laminated glass façade-part of the building's selling point-will now overlook Mr. Meier's third building rather than downtown Manhattan. In January, the Daily News reported that Nicole Kidman wanted to dump her $8 million pad at 176 Perry Street after apparently being irked by the third building.

Suddenly, the original Perry Street towers-which drew such singular praise and attention, in part because of the scarcity of residential buildings by the world-renowned architect-are looking a little less special.

It was they who made the $50 million development the de facto dormitory for downtown A-listers. The high-profile names paid upward of $2,000 per square foot to own a piece of Mr. Meier's cutting-edge design, and the cachet of living in a building designed by a Pritzker Prize–winning architect.

On March 12, Mr. Meier and the developer, Izak Senbahar, formally unveiled the 165 Charles Street tower design at a fashionable party in the white-walled Charles Street gallery. There, guests (including novelist Salman Rushdie) nibbled sushi rolls and clinked champagne flutes as they mingled among clear acrylic models, artists' renderings and architectural plans for the $80 million Charles Street tower. Mr. Meier, wearing a midnight-blue pinstriped suit that contrasted with his flowing white mane, dismissed the notion that his new development will overshadow his Perry Street twins.

"It's like a cousin, not a brother or a sister. So it's related, but it's different," the 69-year-old architect said.

Unlike the Perry Street towers, which Mr. Meier and developer Richard Born delivered as raw space, the 31 condos at Charles Street will be completely designed by Mr. Meier, who will outfit their interiors to match the buildings' signature modernist style.

The building is being marketed by the Sunshine Group at $2,500 per square foot and up-$500 more per square foot than the price at which the Perry Street apartments were marketed. Apartments at the Charles Street building start at $5 million.

For that, buyers also get other amenities absent in its Perry Street "cousins," such as a 12,000-square-foot finished cellar, a professional screening room with 36 seats, a 50-foot-long swimming pool with a cascading waterfall, an exercise room, and a wine cellar for each apartment that can accommodate 360 bottles.

Some brokers who sell high-end real estate say that Mr. Meier diluted the prestige of his Perry Street buildings by launching a third tower.

"When you're buying a Picasso, it's unique. And then when you find out there's going to be a third one, then it's not so unique," said one broker from a major real-estate firm who has shown apartments in the building. "It's very New York."

Mr. Meier's partner in the Charles Street project, Mr. Senbahar, played down any simmering tensions surrounding his mod new development and the flush buyers who fell hard for Mr. Meier's fishbowl design at Perry Street.

"There's no rivalry. I mean, I only read it in the papers. I think people, at the end of the day, are going to be happy to have a Richard Meier building next to them rather than a printer," Mr. Senbahar said, speaking of the industrial lot where the new building is going up. "But to me, I was interested in this because it's pure Richard Meier, inside and out. And that's what I like; I don't like to give an unfinished product. It's a tough thing to do in New York-it's a tough thing to finish a whole apartment."

Whether or not they're leaving in a snit, the Perry Street buildings have lost some of their initial high-voltage buyers-some before they even moved in. There was the report about Nicole Kidman; and then, in the same month, Martha Stewart unloaded her 3,300-square-foot duplex at 173 Perry Street for a reported $7 million. Will there be more? To date, neither Mr. Klein (who owns the $19.5 million penthouse) nor Mr. Schrager has moved in.

Asked if he's now upstaged his celebrity buyers at Perry Street, Mr. Meier invoked the caveat emptor that faces any New York buyer: the march of development and the changing face of the city.

"It's New York," he said.

In fact, the architect-whose work has included the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art and the Getty Center in Los Angeles-sees his buildings creating a lasting impression on the once-industrial wasteland along the Hudson River. After working with Mr. Senbahar and Simon Elias-the team that built the $138 million Grand Beekman at East 51st Street and the $70 million David Rockwell–designed Alex Hotel at East 45th Street-Mr. Meier said the buildings at Perry Street, and now Charles Street, will bring rarefied design to the wind-swept blocks in the far West Village.

"Now it makes me feel like creating Central Park West here, in a sense," he said. "There's a continuity: The buildings are related to one another in a way they haven't been before. And it's a significant part of the city-which no single building can be."

Tony Award–winning playwright and longtime Chelsea resident Richard Greenberg has landed a fashionable new Chelsea duplex in which to pen his next chef d'oeuvre . Late last year, Mr. Greenberg-whose play Take Me Out scored the 2003 Tony for Best Play-closed on a 1,500-square-foot apartment in the London Towne House at 360 West 22nd Street for $950,000. After living in a studio on 23rd Street for the past 15 years, Mr. Greenberg was ready to graduate to a two-bedroom-but he wasn't prepared to leave the land of chiseled gym-goers and gallery-hoppers behind.

"Now I have space," Mr. Greenberg told The Observer . "I'm going to live and work here-I can get away from myself here."

Besides the added breathing space, the apartment features an oversized living room, custom woodwork, office space and a master bathroom with a Jacuzzi shower system. "It has fantastic views. And it's a very easy kind of building, very civilized," Mr. Greenberg said. Indeed, the co-op's amenities also include a 24-hour doorman, a roof garden, a laundry and a parking garage.

Mr. Greenberg is in the midst of a renovation that will personalize his play-writing pad. "I'm actually meeting with my designer right now," Mr. Greenberg said over the phone.

In addition to his Tony Award–winning hit in 2003, Mr. Greenberg was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (in 2003 for Take Me Out , and in 1998 for his drama Three Days of Rain ).

James Ferrando of Douglas Elliman had the exclusive listing on the apartment, along with fellow Elliman broker Dickse Fitzgerald.

Owning Hamptons History: Modern Cottage About to Switch Hands One More Time

A modern beachfront estate built by the famed minimalist designer Joe D'Urso-complete with star-gazing observatory-is close to trading at its $9.95 million asking price, real-estate sources familiar with the property said.

The property, at 174 Further Lane in East Hampton Village, has a formidable history: It's the former home of late Broadway siren Libby Holman, and later of ABC news titan Roone Arledge, who sold it in 1992 to the private investor Richard Pollack, the current owner.

Atop the stucco house, there's a domed metal-plated observatory-complete with a retractable roof-on the three-acre property, which overlooks Two Mile Hollow. There's also a heated, 45-foot-long granite infinity-edge pool and a tennis court.

"It has a very Oriental feeling," said one broker who has toured the property. "There's a beautiful room that faces a private pond. I envy anyone who gets this house."

The property was first listed in 1999 at $14 million. Since then, it has bounced on and off the market. Now, brokers familiar with the proceedings say, an offer is on the table, and a signed deal is near.

"There's some definite interest, and we're pursuing it," said Gary DePersia of Allan M. Schneider Associates, who is representing the property along with Harald Grant of Sotheby's International Realty. Mr. DePersia declined to comment on whether an offer has been accepted.

"Any interest that we have would have to be pretty much full price," he said.

If the house does trade for close to $10 million, the buyers will own a piece of Hamptons history. In the 1960's, Ms. Holman and her artist husband, Louis Schanker, built a modest $10,000 glass cottage designed by the architect Robert Rosenberg, said a longtime East End broker with knowledge of the property.

After Mr. Pollack purchased the property from Mr. Arledge in December 1992 for $2.1 million, he tore down the existing structure and commissioned Mr. D'Urso to build the current four-bedroom home. The house has made a nice gallery for Mr. Pollack's extensive fossil collection, sources who have visited the property say, lending it a museum-like feel. In August, Mr. Pollack told The New York Times : "[The house] is not so modern that it's crazy," but added that "most people just want the old-fashioned shingles, which bore me."

If the thought of plunking down that many zeros for a Suffolk County refuge seems steep, the four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bathroom home, with mahogany floors and trim, is also available as a summer rental for $350,000.

East End Acquisition Makes Corcoran King of the Hamptons Castle

On March 16, the Corcoran Group, which is owned by the N.R.T. Inc., made the latest in a flurry of real-estate acquisitions that has swept through the Hamptons brokerage industry in the past year, when the company purchased Easthampton-based Dayton/Halstead L.L.C., an independent brokerage with 44 agents that recorded $133 million in closed sales in 2003. The move makes Corcoran the largest brokerage on the East End, with nearly 200 brokers spread across 13 offices.

"We're becoming an important player in the Hamptons," Pamela Liebman, Corcoran's president and chief executive, told The Observer. "So when this opportunity came around, we wanted to take advantage of it."

Diane Saatchi, president of Dayton/Halstead, who will become vice president of sales for the Corcoran Group in the Hamptons, said, "I was very pleased with what [Corcoran] did at Cook Pony Farm, and it seemed prudent of me to look towards the future and have a company of our size have [their] backing and support."

The Hamptons, long the province of exclusive brokers who would shepherd beachfront mansions into the arms of heady New York buyers, has become a hot zone of corporate consolidations as Manhattan firms seek out new-and lucrative-markets. Last year, Corcoran, which recorded $5 billion in sales in 2003, purchased Cook Pony Farm Real Estate in Easthampton and Paulette Koch Real Estate in Palm Beach, Fla. In February, Cendant, the parent company of N.R.T., purchased Sotheby International Realty's brand for $100 million. And earlier in January, Manhattan luxury brokerage Brown Harris Stevens snatched up Easthampton-based Dunemere Associates Real Estate.

The few remaining independent brokers on the East End acknowledge the rapidly consolidating market.

"Speaking as a lone boutique person, I don't know what's next. Time will tell if it's good or bad," said Tina Fredericks, who has run her own firm on Georgica Road in Easthampton for the past 35 years. "I've been at it for a very long time, and I happen to think I'm the best. I'm going to hang in there."

Dottie Herman, the chief executive of Prudential Douglas Elliman, Manhattan's largest brokerage, took a measured view of Corcoran's acquisition.

"The move by Corcoran doesn't surprise me. I can give you a list of companies that are looking to sell," she said. "I'm talking to a lot of firms, in the city and on the island. But I'm just not buying to buy; I look at the economics. I'm sure you'll hear some announcements from me, and more from Corcoran. I think competition is healthy."

But the intense competition is making available opportunities to buy scarce. "The consolidation in the Hamptons is just about done," Ms. Herman said.

I've had my say, so I won't dwell on it. The folks at the Manhattan Theatre Club claim they've no intention of compromising their high standards at the Biltmore-and what could be better proof than their risky inaugural production of Richard Greenberg's time-play, The Violet Hour ? Yes (though time will tell). But for me, Mr. Greenberg's messy, overreaching drama is just the sort of nutty play that would have been much better off staged at one of Manhattan Theatre Club's remaining, more modest theaters at City Center, where the glare of Broadway expectations don't exist and the values are different and more understanding. As it is, reviewers have mostly clobbered The Violet Hour , though for different reasons.

A word about the newly opened theater itself: The renovation of the M.T.C.'s Biltmore, dark since 1987, cost many millions. On the one hand, it's always good to see a derelict theater back in business. But they've restored the past and neglected the future. How much more exciting would it have been had they built a theater for the new millennium within the shell of the crumbling old Biltmore! A theater of the future would even be capable of transforming the shape of its auditorium according to the needs of each production. Like the terrific new Zankel Hall in the bowels of Carnegie Hall, it could be highly flexible, not formally static, mutatingly experimental or traditional. Built in 1925, the Biltmore essentially remains a 19th-century theater from the past: a proscenium arch space lovingly restored rather than re-invented.

Keep in mind, though, the belief that in the end, good work will always shine wherever it plays! I've literally seen new plays performed inside a derelict railway yard (a perfect theater in the semi-round) and in the middle of the Sahara Desert (a perfect empty space)-and all ultimately lives or dies depending on what's performed rather than where. Ultimately, it all comes down to the show . And so, to Mr. Greenberg's Violet Hour .

As his F. Scott Fitzgerald character, Denny, puts it: "The really big problem with the Broadway theater today is you always know what's going to happen." Mr. Greenberg's smarty-pants sentiment is true enough, and the characters in his time-bending play are actually about to see a typical Broadway production. The playwright is tipping us off that his own play isn't predictable. Life is predictable! I think. For if anyone can figure out exactly what the unfortunately scattershot, windy playwright is saying in The Violet Hour , they deserve a free ride on H.G. Wells' time machine.

I must say that I wish I could place Mr. Greenberg, as his admirers do, in the same league as Tony Kushner when it comes to the theater of ideas and language. I'm afraid that his gay baseball saga, Take Me Out , struck me as a contrived melodrama drowning in "Greenbergspeak." His use of language is archly mannered, seeming impressive. Words and ideas tumble out of him giddily, becoming unglued. Which baseball player can say of a homophobic lout-as Mr. Greenberg has him say in Take Me Out -that he "reveals a congeries of reprehensible social attitudes"? Oh, phooey! (Oh, congeries!) Nobody talks this way, except Mr. Greenberg.

Perceived as an intellectual, he's a fertile and talented writer who rambles unchecked. His eloquence is overwrought, overheated. Hence this typically bloated exchange early in The Violet Hour :

"I believe in the novel of inclusion," announces Denny, the young aspiring writer. "In the argument between Wells and James, I'm a decided Wellsian."

"You're more McClearyan than either," his potential publisher replies, "and that's not yet a finished thing …. " It sounds good! (It sounds Stoppardian.) It's just gas . Mr. Greenberg's pretentious themes in The Violet Hour -predominantly the near-melancholic, twilight blur between past, present and future, or the struggle between free will, determinism and identity-flicker into occasional promise, but he reveals an approximate mind that too frequently loses focus. It was this same carelessness that characterized his 2001 drama Everett Beekin , about American Jewish life from 1940's New York to late-1990's California . While the first act dealt with a familiar picture-Jews living on the Lower East Side in 1947-it somehow neglected to mention the Holocaust. Not even the imminent foundation of Israel intruded on the coziness of it all. Mr. Greenberg had let his story about the slow drip of assimilation, or whether the goy gets the Jewish girl, run away with the play until it was finally overwhelmed in a conclusion about time passing that proved so densely complicated, it was almost impossible to understand.

The Violet Hour takes place in 1919, in the mess of a young publisher's office. Four of its five characters are transparently based on historic figures: on the cultivated publisher Maxwell Perkins, who's uncertainly starting out in his illustrious career; F. Scott Fitzgerald, here an aspiring novelist in love with a dreamy, spoilt, potentially mad Zelda figure; and Josephine Baker, the play's model for an older black chanteuse with a tale to tell.

The plot-whose twist involves a mysterious machine that prints out the future-revolves around the question of which book the decent, fledgling publisher, John Pace Seavering, will publish: the ludicrously long first novel of his Princeton chum, Denis McCleary, whose heiress fiancée, Rosamund, will kill herself unless it's published; or the memoirs of Seavering's secret mistress, the famous black entertainer Jessie Brewster. Seavering might also have the unspoken hots for Denis, or vice versa. But let's not go into that now.

The Violet Hour's fifth character is the publisher's embittered, campy assistant, who remains anonymously lost to history. It's painful to report that Mr. Greenberg has created only a showbiz stereotype of a screaming queen. I assume the character named Gidger (played by Mario Cantone at the top of his lisping voice) is meant to be amusing. But the dramatist surely didn't intend him to be that woeful, mincing invention of our time, a queer pet for the straight guy. It's an extraordinary lapse.Frankly, Gidger's an embarrassment to everyone.

Anyway, he finds the machine outside Seavering's door that magically spews out thousands of pages from books published in the future. Seavering learns what will happen to himself and his friends! And unpredictable life, Mr. Greenberg appears to be saying, thus becomes as predictable as the usual commercial potboiler on Broadway.

True! The problem with the scatty, Jazz Age Violet Hour is that more or less everything that happens in it is predictable, including its romance-novel melodrama, the ruin of its Scott and Zelda, the self-destruction of its Josephine Baker, and the whimsy of its mysteriously futuristic printing machine.

Directed by Evan Yionoulis, the production has been elegantly designed with sets by Christopher Barreca and costumes by Jane Greenwood. The small cast, capably led by Robert Sean Leonard, went through two very public cast changes before the shaky opening at the Biltmore. Robin Miles, in particular, having taken over the demanding Josephine Baker role with just two weeks' notice, should be proud of her work. Richard Greenberg's play is another story.

theme for a play, and questions of assimilation and historic loss shouldn't be

treated glibly. But I'm afraid that Everett

Beekin , Richard Greenberg's new drama about two generations of Jews living

in 1940's New York and late-1990's California, strikes me as an awesomely easy

cliché of American rootlessness and Jewish life.

The author of the well-regarded Eastern Standard and Three

Days of Rain intends to show us the disintegration of Jewish culture, from

the lives of the Manhattan tenement family in Act I to the assimilated,

sybaritic next generation in contemporary Orange County. (The play was first

produced by Orange County's South Coast Repertory Company.) Let it pass for the

moment that the dramatist retreads the usual

tired ideas and jokes about superior, intellectual New York versus

empty-headed Los Angeles (where the sun shines a lot). His too-predictable

symbol of L.A. as cultural wasteland is as superficial as claiming a loss of

identity by swapping a haimeshe

pickle for an outdoor Jacuzzi. Where are Mr. Greenberg's Jews really coming

from? Where are they going?

The disappointing answer here is: from one stereotype to another.

Mr. Greenberg is surely capable of more than the comforting, sentimentalized

"slice of Jewish life" he's created for the short first act, in which even the

words bubkus and bubeleh are enough to make the audience kvell at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, Lincoln Center. Set in the Lower East Side of 1947, the picture we're given

is uncomfortably close to a harmless sitcom in which the only issue is whether

the goy will get the girl. (He doesn't; she dies.)

There's Ma with the Yiddish accent from the old country who, to

the embarrassment of her more assimilated visiting daughters, goes " Wuss ?" and " Shah !" She's "a character," washing bank notes and hanging them out

to dry. "This way it dries," she explains. "This way it's clean."

"Your father, may he rot in hell," Ma says later, "you couldn't

scratch out of bed to look at a tree. He didn't know from a flower. So he dies.

A fat lot of good it does him, his

city … I want you should know, if I drop dead tonight on the sidewalk of a heart

condition, don't ever let a kind word pass your lips to my sister."

"We won't, ma."

There's talk of her mean rich sister shvitzing in her mink in July. There's

her smart, bickering daughters, Sophie (Robin Bartlett), with her shlump of a husband, and Anna (Bebe

Neuwirth), whose husband is having a breakdown. She's expecting a child. If

it's a boy, she'll name him Stephen, and if it's a girl, Celia after Celia

Johnson in Brief Encounter . (Now

there's assimilation for you.) There's also a bedridden younger sister, Miri,

the spoiled baby of the family, who's said to suffer from summer colds. "She

has a cold like I have a fortune of money," says the knowing Sophie.

Enter the blue-eyed gentile Jimmy Constant, who intends to marry

Miri and make his fortune in California. Here comes trouble! But not as much as

you might think. Ma has the expected hysterics, but upwardly mobile Anna has no

objections. Sophie goes in for her usual sour sitcom philosophy.

"She loves me," Jimmy says of his betrothed. "She respects me,

she's attracted to me, she enjoys my company."

"And from this you build a marriage?" says Sophie.

Now, all of this is fine and dandy, if it's for you-including the

yakking about weight problems, Ma's cooking, moving to Westchester and Jewish

noses. (Anna's Abe is described contemptuously by one of the family as having a

nose "like a Watusi," in which case my entire family are proudly Watusi.) But

this shallow portrait is meant to convey the changing world of Jewish ritual

and culture. Come on! It's a Jackie Mason culture-not an authentic one, not a

kingdom of the heart and mind, lost or abandoned.

How is it possible that even in Mr. Greenberg's semi-assimilated

Jewish family of 1947, there could be no mention of the Holocaust? A Jewish

home of the period that ignores the Holocaust isn't one worth visiting for two

seconds. Even a secular Jewish family of the time would have had fierce and

emotional debates about Zionism and the emerging state of Israel (as my own

family did). Nor were civil rights and anti-Semitism strangers to the crowded

postwar slums of the Lower East Side, or a cultivated intellectual vigor and

curiosity, a social conscience or-my goodness-even the presence of God. But all

Mr. Greenberg has given us is bickering over brisket.

Nothing comes from nothing.

When Everett Beekin migrates to the

sky-blue vacuity of Orange County half a century later, Mr. Greenberg is asking

us to mourn the loss of one lazy culture lite for another. The stereotypes change, but the dramatist's focus

grows fuzzier, the approach more consciously literary. Anna from the first act

now has middle-aged daughters, the bickering Celia and Nell (also played by the

accomplished Ms. Bartlett and Ms. Neuwirth). Uneasy, questing Celia, the New

Yorker permanently in a coat in the Californian heat, is visiting thoroughly

assimilated, conventional Nell in Orange County. "What is that body of water?"

she inquires. (It's the Pacific.)

Body of water? Who

talks this way? Mr. Greenberg's arch eloquence can jar. "Things have been insisting

on themselves lately," says Celia. "Am I innumerate?" ( Innumerate : marked by an ignorance of mathematics.) "A menagerie of

the impossibly old" is lyrical Greenberg-speak for a retirement home.

The longer, fragmentary Act II reveals that Nell's lover is a

retired and wealthy pharmaceuticals fellow named Everett Beekin VII. His dad

was the business partner of the blue-eyed gentile from the first act. His son,

the laid-back Ev (the future Ev the Eighth) is about to be married to Nell's

daughter, valley girl Laurel (possibly named after the canyon).

This is the way Jewish culture will end: not with a pickle, but

the marriage of a dude and a ditz. Celia, trying to make "connections," dimly

remembers her grandmother washing money. Jittery Laurel runs off on a whim,

possibly to Israel because the shopping is good in Tel Aviv. Nell is upset

about the wedding caterers. Ev is upset about Laurel. Celia comforts Ev. Nell

is now upset with Celia. And Everett Beekin VII, who isn't upset about

anything, tells a long, improbable story about his own family history that he

might have invented. Then again, he might not. Mr. Greenberg appears to be

saying, via Ev the Seventh, that all history becomes so vague that it has to be

imagined.

He's mistaken.

His latest play, first produced two years ago at his de facto home, the Royal Shakespeare Company, couldn't be less safe. (The troubled heart of this family drama concerns incest.) The wry Anglo-American culture clashes of Mr. Nelson's Some Americans Abroad , or his wickedly affectionate portrait of those aliens from another planet, the English in America, didn't prepare us for the ambiguous tragic resonance of Goodnight Children Everywhere .

Exile-both literal and emotional-has been a haunting preoccupation of this dramatist. And with all themes of displacement and loss comes the yearning for a sense of place, for those attachments we cannot always rationalize but know as home. In Goodnight Children , the safe harbor of home has been dynamited by war.

Mr. Nelson takes as his starting point the England of September 1939, when, at the beginning of war with Germany, one and a half million people were evacuated from their urban homes to the countryside-750,000 of them children unaccompanied by parents. Some were sent to relatives in America or Canada, others were raised by foster families until the war ended. They became orphans of war.

Goodnight Children is set in a South London apartment in 1945 when four siblings are at last reunited after six years apart. Betty, who's the eldest at 21, remained home during the war. Her two sisters, Ann, now 20, and Vi, 19, were boarded with a Welsh family. In an opening scene of awkward, giggly excitement that is wonderfully real and exact, the sisters await the return from Canada of their kid brother Peter, who's now 17.

"I used to bathe you," Betty says, looking with loving amazement at the self-conscious adolescent who could be a stranger. "He's a man," she adds. "Look at you. Look at you. Look at you," Ann announces proudly at the scene's end. But who do they actually see? And who-Mr. Nelson is asking-have they all become in the trauma of war and separation?

The natural order has lost its moorings, and nothing is quite as it seems. The siblings have grown up too soon, and Peter will travel from adolescence to manhood virtually overnight. The brother becomes the incestuous lover; a sister, the surrogate mother; a husband, the father in this fractured family in search of itself and a role to play.

It takes a bold, or foolish, dramatist to build a modern drama around three sisters (and a brother), for someone has done so before. But Mr. Nelson has pulled it off admirably. The restrained naturalism of the production of Playwrights Horizons struck me as unusual in its shifting, authentic emotion and spontaneity. In that wholly alive, understated sense, it's "Chekhovian." So much so that I looked in my Playbill after the first few scenes to check who the director could be. It was Richard Nelson, who's scarcely directed before.

But the direction is half the play, whose strength resides in its emotional subtext and nuance. It surprises me that some reviewers have found the production's rhythm too self-conscious. It's as if stage naturalism is now so rare that it's seen as unnatural. Mr. Nelson's touch is sure. The erotic confusion and love between Peter and his pregnant, married sister, Ann, for example, is so well acted that even their incestuous attraction for each other seems dangerously reasonable.

Everyone in the cast is excellent-particularly Robin Weigert's touchingly unconfident Betty, heading in her early 20's toward the half-life of a spinster-nurse; Heather Goldenhersh's Vi, caught between adolescent freshness and the certain future of a worldly failed actress; the besotted, incestuous Ann of Kali Rocha is a testing role made very humane by this talented young actress; and Chris Stafford's Peter is, at 17, a taciturn mess, both brother and lover, boy and man, living now in tragic double exile. Most troubling of all in Mr. Nelson's memorable Goodnight Children Everywhere , Peter, the prodigal son, has returned home to live in exile from himself.

To go from such an intelligent, shaded piece to a second-rate yuppie farce by Richard Greenberg is a stretch, and too much of one for me at the best of times. It's said even by Mr. Greenberg's ardent fans that he writes two kinds of play: good ones and bad ones. Hurrah at Last , a production of the Roundabout, at the Gramercy Theater, isn't a good play.

It's a self-important drag, actually-though it wants to be loved and worse, seen as "lovable" in a neo-farcical "madcap" kind of way. That's why it has an enormous, dull dog in it. Dreyfus, the 200-pound English mastiff who plays frolicsome Thunder, is just big and dull and bored, exhibiting no appetite at all for the role. He puts in a token appearance, lumbering onstage to stare balefully at the audience. Then he's sort of pushed into the wings to eat all the offstage antiques.

Dreyfus is meant to signal adorably serious fun, like the play. He needn't be in the play. His performance is so lackluster that in a sense he isn't there. We long for his understudy, Eve, to bound on and make something happen-wreak havoc, be pugnacious, be alive, wake us up, dare to take risks, shock us, astonish us, anything but the predictable yuppie beat of Mr. Greenberg's deadening hero, a failed novelist who's gay, embittered and obsessed with money.

Also appearing: our hero Laurie's sister, who is infertile, and her husband, an inconsequential Irish multimillionaire; Laurie's wealthy Jewish parents, the usual coarse stereotypes; and Laurie's friend and film adapter, a successful dramatist-though God knows how-who's in love with Laurie for some reason and married to a child-bearing woman who speaks no English.

In the first act, it takes Mr. Greenberg what seems like many hours to set up a lame visual gag in which the successful dramatist strips for Laurie to reveal all-rather than reveal how much money he makes. Geddit? In the second act, our hero ends up in the hospital having poisonous delusions. There was time enough to step back during his delirium to assess how comically likable the "witty" hero really is.

Let's see: He hates his dumb ma (naturally), while seeing his old dad as a beaten borscht belt comic in disguise; he's contemptuously ungrateful to sympathetic sis; he loathes and envies the successful; he's consumed by other people's money; he feels the world owes him a living; a failure, he is narcissistically impressed by no one except himself.

He's less an interesting comic hero, more a tedious whiner. The talented director, David Warren, has shrewdly dressed up this nonsense as a spiffy farce out of a Williams-Sonoma catalogue. No fool he: If your attention drifts, you can shop. The cast-including Peter Frechette as the near hysterical Laurie and the delightful Dori Brenner keeping a very straight face as his mum-is accomplished. The dog isn't.