OLD HAT.(A Naked Girl on the Appian Way)(Theater Review)

How many times will we have to put up with her--that gnomelike old crone, usually in some form of tracksuit, whose potty-mouthed utterances silence all interlocutors? She has caused trouble and strife without blinking an eye in countless films and TV shows, from "Where's Poppa?" to "The Golden Girls." Sadie (Ann Guilbert), the nasty old broad in Richard Greenberg's "A Naked Girl on the Appian Way" (a Roundabout production at the American Airlines), is even meaner than most. After she walks, white-haired and goggle-eyed, into what she thinks is the Hamptons house of her much hated former daughter-in-law, Sadie calls out, "Elaine? You dumb bitch, where've you been?" And we're off. For the rest of the play, Sadie piles profanity on top of profanity, devouring scones as she does so. Her bile serves only to confirm our worst fears about old age, especially where women are concerned: it is a sour vat of discontent, with no second chances and no way out save malice or death.

Plays, it goes without saying, can and do act as mouthpieces for their authors' ideas and visions. Here, Greenberg's distinctly American age phobia dovetails with his fear of women: he believes, it seems, that once a woman is no longer "pretty"--and thus no longer useful to a man's eye or heart--she becomes a wreck of negative feelings. It is those feelings that Bess (Jill Clayburgh), a cookbook author whose house Sadie has actually stumbled into, tries to keep at bay with her plasma-screen smile. Bess wants her life to be as sweet and as obvious as a sitcom. A contented wife to Jeffrey (Richard Thomas), and a loving mother to her three racially diverse, adopted, now adult children, she dices and bakes and listens to Sadie with the forbearance of a woman who has never wanted anything more or less than her own and her family's happiness.

She has achieved it, in a sense. The blond highlights in her hair match her tasteful mustard-colored blouse. Her kitchen is well stocked. And, when Jeffrey expresses some doubt about what he should do with the rest of his life, Bess takes it all in stride, cheering him on as she prunes her basil. She herself has plenty to look forward to: two of her children, Thad (Matthew Morrison) and the Dominican-born Juliet (Susan Kelechi Watson), are returning from a holiday abroad together. Of course, their homecoming should be a cause for celebration. And it is, until they reveal that they've fallen in love--with each other. Bess is the first to catch them in the act. Descending the stairs of her perfectly appointed home, she discovers Thad and Juliet in a deep lip-lock. The phone rings. With a smile that threatens to split her face in two, Bess--ever polite, ever the queen of her own castle--answers it with a pleasant "Hello?" that suggests that she's evading the issue even as she stares at it.

Greenberg enjoys dramatizing themes--homosexuality and sports in "Take Me Out" (2003); the business of art in "The Violet Hour" (2003)--and he wants "Appian Way" to show us that nothing in upper-middle-class life appears to be what it is. But the cacophony of one-liners and the rush of secrets exposed in the last minutes make this fast-paced show a rather shallow experience. It is the playwright who has failed here, because the actors--particularly Clayburgh--give the production their all.

Now sixty-one, Clayburgh came of age as a star during that brief yet brilliant time in the late seventies and early eighties when the anti-glamorous--the real--was in vogue. While actors like Robert De Niro and Brad Dourif offered a view into fractured maleness, Clayburgh played, in such films as "An Unmarried Woman" (1978) and "I'm Dancing as Fast as I ...