Stage:

...He is finally ready to answer her question when the play is nearly over, but she will not listen until he eats, which he refuses to do since he is drinking himself to death on champagne...

...But the TV scenes are as obvious as the kind of parody television does of itself...

...I'm sorry 1 kept you waiting," she says as he exits...

...The string of therapists-none of whom can help Rachel, of course-derives its substance only from its place in the long line of comic analysts who have appeared in American plays and movies since the 1920s...

...Reckless may be closer to where we live today, but, after sampling it, you might find it rewarding to take a vacation from the slapstick malaise represented by so many plays, movies, and presidential campaigns and take a taste of Shaw...

...Later in the play, we learn that she was thinking not about what she was saying-she seldom does-but of the puppy she never had as a child, and will not receive this Christmas as a wife and mother, and about scratching its imaginary ears...

...What are we to make of that last line...

...The Circle Rep production feeds those doubts...

...Shaw always pleases me, but there was a special piquancy this time in seeing a play in which choices make a difference to the individual and to society...

...Even so, there might be trouble with that last scene...

...These things happen for a reason, I keep saying it...

...Although Robin Bartlett's Rachel is able to add an undertone of hysteria to her optimistic chatter before one disaster too many makes her speechless, the character is not that different from the other cartoon figures who people the stage...

...I laughed at it (perhaps with it) and admired Lucas's talent for oblique dialogue, and I found myself wondering if it might be played so that all those allusions to identity, self-knowledge, rationality would seem neither gratuitous nor portentous by letting the characters escape caricature...

...A last joke in a play in which therapy is useless and Rachel's gestures of amiable succor regularly lead to disaster...

...Neither reading is quite satisfactory...

...For me, however, their work seems not to go through laughter to pain but to become a defense against it, revelation as denial...

...A sentimental coda to a farcical horror story...

...STAGE LAUGHING ON THE OUTSIDE CRAIG LUCAS'S 'RECKLESS' At the beginning of Craig Lucas's Reckless, Rachel is having one of her "euphoria attacks," as she says, babbling away about Christmas, snow, Santa Claus, Alaska-a pattern of images that conveys domestic coziness-and her husband Tom responds by pulling away from her words, her touch...

...In the last scene, which is played in a very different tone from the rest of the play, she is speaking again, as a therapist herself now, and her patient is Tom, Jr., whom she has not seen since her precipitous exit into the snow...

...I prefer an uglier last scene...

...She speaks as the doctor, apologizing to the patient for his having had to sit a while in the waiting room, but the line belongs to the mother who has made the son wait twenty years...

...He may intend the roles that Rachel and her friends assume in the game show to parallel shifting identities in the play as a whole and to make some point about on-screen/ off-screen realities (Rachel comforts a crying Tom, "It's just the news, come on, it's not real...

...After Rachel goes out over the roof in her slippers and housecoat, she encounters, primarily as an observer, murder, theft, self-induced starvation-terror played as farce, kept in comic perspective by her constant adjustment to new situations...

...That is not Reckless at the Circle Rep, and it may not even be Reckless as Lucas wrote it...

...In the second act, Rachel loses her often reiterated belief that there is purpose in the events she has been a part of and concludes, "Things just happen...

...They do not play games at graveside, as Samuel Beckett does...

...It was so well received that the Circle Repertory's customary limited run had to be extended, but I have the impression that audiences are responding only to the funny surface of the play...

...What's more, I am reluctant to go beneath that surface for fear I will founder in a morass of contemporary platitudes about the difficulties of surviving in an accidental universe...

...I doubt that Rachel could ever be a Camus/Sartre existentialist, accepting the absurdity of existence, and choosing to create herself despite that frightening knowledge...

...They play, in typical Lucas fashion, with really and know and come to no conclusion...

...Reckless seemed to do much the same thing at Circle Rep...

...Now grown, haunted by the disappearance of his mother, the death of his father, his brother's apparent madness, he needs help at Christmas (most of the violent events in the play take place at Christmas) and he finds it in this doctor who somehow reminds him of his mother...

...GERALD WEALESERALD WEALES...

...On the surface, Lucas's play suggests the work of playwrights as different as Durang, Albert Innaurato, and John Guare, all of whom write farces that deal glancingly with the dark-side of contemporary life...

...It is a conventional reading of the play, nicely but not excitingly staged...

...Tom's distress is not at her relentless chatter-at least not immediately-but at his having taken out a contract on her life, an apparently irrevocable act that he now regrets...

...Reckless is something of a problem for me...

...Aside from the ludicrous calamities that befall the central characters ("Life's been reckless with these people," says a doctor in the shelter scene), Lucas offers television parody and psychiatrist jokes...

...In the scene that follows, Lloyd dies and she goes silent...

...If we have been given glimpses of the chaos beneath the comic horrors and Rachel's Pollyanna gloss on them, the final scene could be played with great force as a positive scene that does not recognize that it confirms the negation...

...instead of an answer, we get a teasing attempt to feed him which dances lightly over what is an essentially scary scene...

...she asks Lloyd, the man who rescues her in the snow...

...Do you think we ever really know people...

...they just play games...

...The day after I saw Reckless, I went to see a preview of the new production of The Devil's Disciple at the Circle in the Square...