Stage:

...At the end, the intruders removed, the four main characters gather center stage for a toast...

...GERALD WEALESLD WEALES...

...He is the young man more ambitious than his stultifying surroundings (see Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth) who finally falls victim to the prejudices and jealousies of his old associates...

...Greenberg's device is to introduce into this foursome a pushily charming would-be actress and a foul-mouthed bag woman, whose presence in Stephen's summer house alleviates some of their residual social guilt while upsetting the routine that feeds their self-absorption...

...By concentrating on the deficiencies of King's play-too much plot, too much message-I am unfair to The Night Hank Williams Died...

...Trapped in a loveless marriage, she pushes Thurmond to go with her to Nashville to peddle his songs, and when Gus refuses to lend them money for the trip, Thurmond bungles a burglary, kills a man, and is finally gunned down by a nasty cliche of a sheriff...

...Instead, he sticks around Gus's bar, talking about his glorious past and his triumphant future, singing the songs that are supposed to make him famous (King's songs, actually) and remembering his high-school sweetheart, Nellie Bess Power...

...On the other hand, Thurmond seems not so much a dreamer as a garrulous cadger of drinks, a petty thief, a self-pitying young man who cannot accept that he has ended as a filling-station attendant...

...Thurmond sees himself as a country music star, in the image of his idol Hank Williams, but, unlike Chance, he never leaves his small Texas town to test his talents in the big world...

...King's hero, Thurmond Stottle, is a combination of two of American drama's favorite losers...

...It is the return of Nellie Bess which initiates the action of the play...

...The same thing might be said of Eastern Standard...

...Nellie Bess's mother, who sees visions of Jesus...

...Although she likes her work as Stephen does not, both of them have empty personal lives, presumably one result of a misplaced sense of values...

...The Night Hank Williams Died does it old-style...

...When he falls back on what Tennessee Williams, speaking of his own work, called "cornpone melodrama," King artificially inflates the significance of his protagonist...

...Stephen and Phoebe have found one another, and so have Peter and Drew, although presumably theirs is to be a spiritual union-more no sex than safe sex...

...We are told that the whole town is gossiping about Thurmond and Nellie Bess, but we see only eccentric examples of the townsfolk-the bullying sheriff...

...King has a good ear for Texas dialect and a skillful way of using it for the best comic effects...

...Thurmond has no family and no friends, except for Gus, a surrogate father (Nellie Bess's real father, the subplot whispers), whose function is to expound-repeatedly-the play's thematic point...

...The play is pleasant enough, if only the audience were not expected to take it so seriously...

...The AIDS subplot, in which Phoebe's brother, Peter, newly diagnosed with the disease, fends off the advances of Stephen's friend, Drew, is a bit difficult to work into the central theme unless one wants to take the far-right position that AIDS is a punishment for a badly chosen way of life-not simply homosexuality, in this case, but the sins of being a television writer and a fashionable painter...

...By comparison to this folderol, the killing of Thurmond Stottle seems downright realistic...

...The town has little real presence...

...In a final scene after Thurmond's funeral-a coda of sorts- Nellie Bess describes him as a dreamer in a land without dreams...

...But to each his own angst...

...Stephen is a successful architect who has come to believe that his work is harmful to the urban environment it is transforming, and Phoebe is a Wall Street type who has been closely allied, sexually and professionally, with a man charged with insider trading...

...If it comes to a choice between Larry L. King's platitudes and those of Richard Greenberg, I would prefer to be in Gus's bar listening to Thurmond sing "I Keep Waking Up with Strangers...

...Her line places the play in the generic context I described above, but it is a little difficult to elevate Thurmond into a symbolic sacrifice to small-town narrowness...

...and a comic drunk who gets all the best lines...

...Although characters as venerable as Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus have discovered that getting what you want is not worth the price you pay, Greenberg's play about contemporary soul-sellers is in the new vein of Yuppie distress...

...He is a star high-school athlete (see Biff inDeath of a Salesman) who has never adjusted to the day the cheering stopped...

...That the toast makes happiness play second fiddle to disappointment and that the wine is flat and has to be spat out cannot hide the fact that Greenberg offers a happy ending...

...Add that, except for some of Drew's acid throwaways, there is little wit in Eastern Standard...

...To cure the social ills, Stephen and his friends are about to embark on an enterpri se to build homes for the homeless...

...Both King's play, rich in country music and country metaphor, and Greenberg's brittle New York comedy are in the long line of plays and novels in which American society defeats or disappoints the protagonist...

...STAGE A LAND WITHOUT DREAMS 'HANK WILLIAMS' & 'STANDARD' For works so unalike on the surface, Larry L. King's The Night Hank Williams Died and Richard Greenberg's Eastern Standard have a great deal in common...

...The play would be more painful-and probably more accurate-if Thurmond were left in Gus's bar at the end, trying to promote a bottle of beer for himself, while Nellie Bess went back to her boring chiropractor...