This Side of Crazy

Christopher Durang's impact on a younger generation of playwrights, one steeped in the bawdy, logic-flouting anarchy of modern life, has been well documented. Occasionally, though, a writer proves so influential that even his elders fall under his stylistic sway. Such would appear to be the case with A.R. Gurney, who has plunked two of Mr. Durang's most beloved collaborators (Sigourney Weaver and Kristine Nielsen) and any number of his past tropes (sexual confusion, mental illness, wacky servants) into "Crazy Mary," Mr. Gurney's latest examination of the diminishing status spheres of WASPdom.

But while he is to be commended for trying something looser and lustier than his standard brand of incisive bemusement, Mr. Gurney's old habits die hard after some two dozen plays, and madcap is not among his stronger suits. "Crazy Mary" represents Mr. Gurney, director Jim Simpson, and the actors at something close to their best behavior. And good behavior is precisely what this material — a lurid amalgamation of "Flowers for Algernon," Rosemary Kennedy, and the squirmy flirtations of "Back to the Future" — does not need.

Like so many of Mr. Gurney's protagonists, including the young man at the center of last year's criminally underrated "Indian Blood," Lydia (Ms. Weaver) and her college-age son, Skip (Michael Esper), hail from the decreasingly affluent circles of Buffalo, N.Y. Skip is in the process of squandering a Harvard education, while Lydia is selling real estate and grumbling about her deadbeat jazz-musician husband. But an unlikely potential savior has emerged: a distant, allbut-forgotten cousin named Mary (Ms. Nielsen), who has spent more than 30 years festering in a Boston mental hospital — and is sitting on a sizable trust.

Given the sizable trust that exists under Mary's name and the lack of updates from the hospital, Lydia half suspects that her cousin, whom she knows vaguely from their childhood, is already dead. She's not, although a visit to Boston confirms that Mary has spent many of the years in a severely compromised state, despite the attentive care of a psychiatrist named Jerome (Mitchell Greenberg) and a kind nurse named Pearl (Myra Lucretia Taylor). The arrival of the avaricious Lydia — and, more to the point, of the fetchingly discontented Skip — coaxes her out of her catatonia and into a recapitulation of the racy doings that got her committed in the first place.

Anyone who's seen the rubbernecked, saucer-eyed Ms. Nielsen blast her way across the stage in plays like "Omnium Gatherum" and Mr. Durang's "Betty's Summer Vacation" will get a perverse tingle watching her as the near-comatose Mary of Act I. Unfortunately, that silence sounds better and better when compared to Mr. Gurney's uncharacteristically lumpen dialogue; the first scenes are filled with WASPy matriarchs saying things such as "There's more than one way to skin a cat" and Pearl, a black nurse, saying things such as "You go, girl!" Actually, Pearl's material doesn't improve much when Mary finally resurfaces: Messrs. Gurney and Simpson devote considerable stage time to her unfunny attempts at imitating an Irish maid. (This plot device, stemming from Mary's privileged adolescence, is the sort of thing that Mr. Durang does a lot better.) The fortunes of the play do, however, pick up as Skip finds himself reintroducing Mary to life through questionable means. Mr. Esper, whose brittle confrontations with Ms. Weaver ring false near the beginning, gains his footing as a young man whose empathy and restlessness lead him in confusing directions.

Aside from the occasional comic flourish, the brittle, constrained Lydia offers Ms. Weaver little beyond what she has shown in "The Ice Storm" and any number of other unhappy-mom roles; Lydia is easily the least developed of the three main roles, and it's somewhat puzzling why Ms. Weaver, who had played Mary in an earlier reading, took it on. Her loss, however, is Ms. Nielsen's gain. Reining in her usual loose-limbed antics, Ms. Nielsen straddles the girlishness that has endeared Mary to the hospital staff and the sensuality that so rattled her family 30 years earlier. (Claudia Brown's costumes offer a poignant glimpse at a middle-aged woman's attempt at coquettishness.)

Mary's reawakening sets in motion such a rich and emotionally complex set of events, in fact, that Mr. Gurney doesn't seem quite sure how to resolve them. He wraps up "Crazy Mary" with an all-too-tidy coda that dodges many of the play's thornier moral and psychological questions. Where a more brazen writer — a Christopher Durang, say — would let these quandaries spin into their logical (or defiantly illogical) conclusions, Mr. Gurney's deeply ingrained empathy prevents him from taking that last step. That equanimity has enriched numerous of his plays in the past, but he ultimately proves too sane for "Crazy Mary."

Until June 17 (416 W. 42nd St., between Ninth and Tenth avenues, 212-279-4200).