Is There Life Before Death?

"Landscape of the Body" is a one of-a-kind pastiche of tabloid murder, music-hall songs, and various stock Hollywood scenes. Playwright John Guare has no great love of rules, and his 1977 play shifts from naturalistic dialogue to speeches cribbed from film noir, absurdist digressions, and cabaret numbers backed by an onstage band. The random characters include a former Good Humor man, a cross-dressing Latino travel agent, and a detective in Groucho Marx glasses.

But though "Landscape of the Body" can feel like three boxes of jigsaw pieces dumped onto the same table, in the end it holds together. It is essentially the story of a collection of lost souls and their deep yearning to be understood, known, and maybe even loved.

Michael Grief's new production gets the vertiginous feeling of Mr. Guare's play exactly right. As the events unfold, his world becomes unstable. Certain characters have the weight and substance of real people, but they push through the surreal air as if it were quicksand. Watching "Landscape of the Body" is like having someone else's bad dream.

The nightmare's locale is Christopher Street in the 1970s, one of the sordid underbellies of a tabloid-loving city. Gay men prowl for teenage boys, and the teenage boys beat them with wrenches and steal their wallets. Down by the pier, bodies float in the water, severed from their heads. And Rosalie (Sherie Rene Scott), a pretty girl just arrived from Maine, snorts coke and makes shudder-inducing hard-core porn - until her body is smashed through a plate-glass restaurant window.

But Rosalie reappears, wearing the sparkly white gown of a 1940s movie star. She has a tough broad's delivery and a stripper's shimmy and, as played by the incomparable Ms. Scott, is impossible not to like. Rosalie may have been a wretched, amoral creature in life, but as a ghost, she's glorious. ("I dare ask the question," she says to the audience. "Is there life before death?")

Like Virgil, Rosalie leads us through the rungs of hell. The trouble begins in seedy, erratic Greenwich Village, the setting of the real life "Bag Murders" of the 1970s. Inside Rosalie's old apartment, her sister Betty (Lili Taylor) sets up house with her fatherless son, Bert (Stephen Scott Scarpulla). As earnest and old-fashioned as her name, Betty still has dreams, which draws us to her. But her offhand approach to parenting - smoking pot with her teenage son, asking him to wash her hair - is off-putting.

The compelling Ms. Taylor plays Betty with the clouded eyes of a woman who can't face the hardness of life. She struggles through, but her misery makes her oblivious to certain things - like her son's desperate need for her. When Betty abandons Bert for a few days to pursue a spur-of-the-moment marriage proposal from an old acquaintance, he panics, setting off events that lead to two grisly murders.

The original seed of "Landscape of the Body" was New York's tabloid obsession with the infamous Alice Crimmins trials of 1968 and 1971, in which a mother and former cocktail waitress was charged with the murder of her two small children. Betty, too, is charged with murder, but Mr. Guare makes it clear that her only crimes were selfishness and neglect. Yet somehow, in the mad whirl of songs and scenes both earthly and ghostly, he makes you feel that selfishness and neglect may be the darkest crimes of all - and simple compassion may be the greatest gift a person can bestow.

Mr. Guare's no-holds-barred imaginings can be exhilarating, but they are often maddening. Mr. Greif massages the disparate elements into a coherent whole, and having mounted the same play with the same two stars at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2003, he's had time to polish it. Still, some of the cabaret songs don't quite hit their mark, and the young actors can be tinny and a bit forced. The play's continual vacillations between naturalism and cartoonish fantasy can be irritating; as a story, "Landscape of the Body" doesn't always convince.

What does convince is Ms. Scott's astonishing turn as Rosalie, which hits its target more precisely than any performance by an actor in recent memory. Rosalie is both a woman and a creature from a dream, a likable broad and a repellant loser, a sorority girl and a Virgilian guide. It's a near-impossible part. Yet the prodigiously talented Ms. Scott plays Rosalie as if she were born to it, giving her so many layers, so many pitch-perfect inflections, that finally it becomes difficult to differentiate the actor from the character. Ms. Scott's extraordinary performance takes the Mr. Guare's outsize, troubling dream and gives it back to us, still warm from her lungs.

Until May 31 (555 W. 42nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-352-3101).