Stage:

...With a little manipulation, the phrase could be use to define the characters in Nelson's own new play, Some Americans Abroad, at the Newhouse at Lincoln Center...

...They work to dissociate themselves from the American tourists who flood England in the summer, although they necessarily frequent the theaters, the bookstores, and the restaurants where American visitors gather...

...There are two plots at work beneath his travelogue...

...Nelson found that the plays from the 1920s and 1930s-comedies and dramas alike-bore a family resemblance despite their surface differences...

...Tom has been a valued collaborator...

...Profoundly innocent and coldly ruthless...

...A GRATEFUL GOOD-BY Tom O'Brien's first movie review appeared in these pages on February 10, 1984...

...no professor of English literature and certainly no Englishman would stand on Westminster Bridge in the rain and sing "God Save the Queen" after reciting the appropriate Wordsworth sonnet...

...Nelson's professors are anglophiles, determined not to be innocents abroad...

...Joe's ruthlessness lies in what he does not do-his inability to face any kind of crisis directly...

...But Nelson has something else in mind for poor Henry...

...We look forward to his continued presence as book reviewer and essayist...

...Their knowing ineptness can be funny, although Nelson purposely overstates their acquired Englishness...

...The Americans abroad in Nelson's comedy are a group of professors leading a summer theater study tour...

...The McNeils are on the trip, at their own expense, because Henry, who has already been fired and does not know it, hopes to ingratiate himself with Joe and hang onto his temporary appointment...

...When we first meet them, they are at a table where Joe Taylor, the head of the English department, is holding forth on the inefficacy of political demonstrations, interrupted only by Philip Brown, his colleague, friend, and perennial verbal antagonist...

...Neither Joe nor Philip can be deflated, so the rhetoric rolls on...

...In the final scene, another dinner, Joe retreats, haltingly, onto the safe ground of words...

...As Joe-played with scary accuracy by Colin Stinton-weaves an analysis of Major Barbara, timid Henry McNeil squeaks amiably that the play is on the syllabus for Joe's course, isn't it...

...It seems at first that Henry-an outsider in this Ivy-covered company-may be a soft-spoken individual, like the Feiffer character, whose quiet sentences are deadly...

...Here, Some Americans Abroad, a lightweight show, reveals its kinship to Nelson's much more serious Principia Scriptoriae...

...Perhaps not, but close enough to evoke Nelson's description of his lost plays...

...Henry is played by Bob Balaban, who was Jules Feiffer's Anthony Rose earlier this season in Philadelphia...

...Now he is moving on to new projects in Washington, D.C...

...What made them American, he decided, was the "something unique to the American character that allows profound innocence and cold ruthlessness to inhabit the same being...

...Since the play is a product of the late 1980s (it was commissioned and presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1989), both the innocence and the ruthlessness wear veils of obfuscating words...

...That they are strangers abroad is obvious, a condition that has its dark side...

...in Some Americans Abroad, potentially ugly realities are hidden behind the flow of words, literary ideas as a sound baffle...

...Stage GERALD WEALES INNOCENCE & RUTHLESSNESS 'SOME AMERICANS ABROAD' In 1986, Theatre Communications Group published Strictly Dishonorable and Other Lost American Plays, four works "selected and introduced by" Richard Nelson...

...In that work, the ugliest realities lack force until they are given literary expression...

...A hysterical student accuses Philip of abusing her-touching her breast-and Joe, protecting himself, consults Baldwin, the dean back home, and almost everyone but Philip...

...The Baldwins, the former department chairman and his wife, who have retired to East Sussex to be near Henry James's Lamb House, have not found paradise, as his drinking indicates, and the former student who has arranged the theater tickets for the group yearns to be part of them since she is clearly not at home in her English husband's world...

...Nelson has a good ear for the pretentious platitude that skewers the speaker, but his play has more serious work to do than to guy Americans abroad...

...The obvious comedy in Some Americans Abroad lies here...

...He is blind to the consequences of his inaction, just as he is unaware of matters (Philip's affair with a married colleague) and reactions (his daughter's distress) not on a syllabus...

...They segue into an argument over the contemporary relevance of Bernard Shaw...

...there followed five years of steady, careful, and incisive comment not just about the silver screen, but about the larger culture and its cinematic expression...