Stage

...Susan, whose husband understandably deserted her (even she says that), has brushed off her artschool skills and made a living as an illustrator of button-cute Hallmark cards...

...she has raised three children, the last of whom, the son, is about to go out on his own...

...Perhaps Gurney simply wants to avoid the kind of good angel-bad angel division that Bil Keane now and then uses in his cartoon, "Family Circus," and to suggest that human beings are more complex than neat definitions imply...

...I cannot believe that Gurney intended the characters as I perceive them, but if he did, I presume he is suggesting that both the 1950s, which formed Susan, and the 1980s, which formed Jake, are forcing ground for hollow men...

...The device in Sweet Sue is to allow four actors to play two characters...

...Although he can be overtly preachy, as he was in last season's The Perfect Party, he generally allows the social theme to emerge from his comedy...

...GERALD weales 84: Commonweal...

...STACE DOUBLE JEOPARDY GURNETS 'SWEET SUE' Dver since the success of The Dining Room in 1982, A. R. Gurney, Jr...

...There are moments in Sweet Sue in which one of the Susans appears more maternal, the other more seductive...

...The result is unnervingly arch...

...Gurney, who has been teaching literature for twenty-five years, has to know that references to Anna Karenina, opera, and the Talking Heads do not indicate that the speakers are interesting or witty...

...Similarly, one of the Jakes sometimes seems more sensitive and romantic, the other more direct and carnal...

...Both Moore and Redgrave are accomplished comedians, but in Sweet Sue they display the mannerisms that television has made familiar, with even a sit-com-deep character, to suggest substance behind the gestures...

...Perhaps to forestall the possibility that his work may be taken as cousin to that of a joking moralist like Jean Kerr, Gurney has used a variety of devices to subvert the straightforward development of conventional comedy...

...I further confess that I do not care whether or not Susan and Jake ever get together...

...Sweet Sue is about a summer when a woman of uncertain age (late forties, early fifties) does or does not sleep with her son's college roommate, who has come to spend the vacation as a guest in her house and a partner to her son in a housepainting venture...

...Gurney, has been at it for thirty years and has built a solid reputation as a playwright without the Broadway imprimatur...

...For the most part, the gimmick aside, the scenes are to be taken as actual encounters, but Susan is also given to fantasy so that occasionally the Susans and the Jakes act out a might-have-been scene, usually one involving Jake's posing in the nude...

...Jake, a victim of the new sexual freedom, wants a relationship with a woman that is not simply physical, but intellectual and spiritual as well...

...So it is with the two Jakes...

...At this moment, she would like to do something serious as an artist, paint a believable tree (or a nude), and as a woman, find a love more intense than the tepid companionship of the two nice boring men we never see...

...A sensible social point, just the kind that Gurney might well make, but Sweet Sue finally comes across like one of Susan's greeting cards, more cute than acute...

...As Jake leaves at the end, Susan follows him, offering him a beer and an invitation to stay and talk...

...This is a set-up for a replenishing summer romance from which both characters return, their confidence restored, their sense of self strengthened...

...Jake is a whiner of sorts, and Susan is given to mean-spirited one-liners which presumably mask her distress, but actually underline her shallowness...

...As a further complication, one or the other of the Susans speaks to herself in a monologue or to the audience in direct address...

...In the scenes with Jake, one Susan picks up the other's words, often in midsentence, and goes on with the scene only to step aside in her turn...

...Nor are they particularly charming...

...The son conveniently stays offstage — as gratuitous a device as Gurney has ever contrived — so that the woman and the son's friend can interact, as undergraduates like to say these days...

...The Middle Ages takes place in the trophy room of a men's club over a period of thirty years, and the more ambitious The Dining Room lets a group of actors move from one family of characters to another as the titular room chronicles the changes 13 February 1987: 83 in society...

...Those of us who have long admired his work (I first came across Gurney when I read The Golden Fleece in 1972) wished him well as he moved out to a wider audience...

...The two Susans talk to one another, sometimes amiably, sometimes peevishly...

...I confess I do not know whether or not they ever get together...

...The coldness in the characters is partly a product of the device that splits them in two, but the playing — particularly of the Susans — does not help...

...one more professional, the other more personal...

...Susan Two then tells the audience how they fell into one another's arms, how they met here, there, elsewhere — including one chilly walk during which Jake bought her a plum-colored sweater — and finally how they agreed to part...

...Gurney's milieu is the comfortable WASP middle class, and his perception is of a society in decline, perhaps happily so...

...Susan comes back on stage, wearing the plum-colored sweater but saying that Jake refused to stay for the beer, thus leaving the audience with an ambiguous explanation for the wryly upbeat final scene between the two Susans...

...Yet, there is no consistency in the presentation, no serious attempt to suggest that the doubling represents separate and conflicting aspects of the characters...

...has been circling Broadway, coming closer and closer to the showcase that once was the goal of every aspiring dramatist...

...However, now that he has finally come to Broadway with Sweet Sue and two bonafide media stars — Mary Tyler Moore and Lynn Redgrave — the result is disappointing...

...They are two of the dullest people ever to come down the pike...

...Beyond that, there is doubt about what course of behavior is good or bad, correct or incorrect within the context of the play itself...