Smother Love.(The American Plan)(Theater review)

Did you come of age in those sweet summers of the early nineteen-sixties, when the airwaves were full of rock and roll's doo-wop promise of joy and the nation was full of J.F.K.'s eloquent promise of a New Frontier? I did. Life seemed to be laid out before us like a banquet; everything was for the taking, especially hearts. Richard Greenberg's "The American Plan" (an update of his debut play, from 1990, elegantly directed by David Grindley, at the Samuel J. Friedman) opens in one such summer, on a lake in the Catskills. In Jonathan Fensom's well-conceived set, a raked dock overlooks the leafy frontage of a hotel across the lake. On the dock, a fetching, ponytailed blond woman listlessly reads a book. Suddenly, a buff young man rises from the water like a pumped-up Poseidon, his smile and his pecs gleaming. "Oh . . . hi," he says, for clumsy openers. "I just took a swim." This godlike materialization foreshadows the omnipotence that the handsome man will come to represent; the young woman, it turns out, has been watching him all summer--and waiting for a savior.

She is Lili (Lily Rabe), the beautiful but nervy daughter of a wealthy, manipulative German Jewish emigre, Eva (Mercedes Ruehl), who is referred to locally--for her foreignness and her grandiosity--as "the Duchess." He is Nick (Kieran Campion), "more or less" a writer for Time--"the Weekly Cultural Epiphany," as he puts it mockingly--with aspirations of becoming an architect. From this somewhat incredible beginning, with its glib exposition that smacks of romantic comedy, Greenberg reverses our narrative expectations and spins a psychologically astute, compelling study of narcissistic delusion--his version of "The Heiress," in which the payoff is not revenge but revelation about the stranglehold of symbiosis. The title, "The American Plan," is an ironic reference to the hotel's eating arrangements, which include three square meals a day. The play, however, is about greed of an altogether different kind: financial, psychic, and sexual.

As the plot unfolds, both Lili and Nick are shown to be wounded, ruthless, voracious souls who seek in each other some kind of magical deliverance. Lili presents herself as a passive, self-dramatizing victim. Within minutes of their first meeting, she is pointing Eva out from the dock. "That looming, late-Ibsenesque figure with the Mah Jong tiles," she says, adding, "She's really a dreadful woman." Lili nurses a grievance against her mother that, in its exaggeration, is almost high camp: Eva is, according to Lili, the "murderer" of Lili's father and an anti-Semitic, serial tuft hunter, whose conquests include Himmler and Mies van der Rohe. Eva, Lili tells Nick, is "holding me captive here" in the family summer house.

Lili is so attractive, her wit so quirky, her intelligence so charming that her story seems plausible. It's hard for Nick or for us, at first, to register the extent of her hysteria. At the end of the opening scene, however, a hint of her desperation shows through. "Please--would you please--come see me sometimes? There's no one--I don't speak to anyone--and they're--they're very stern with me," she says, suddenly grabbing him and kissing him, before being led away to tea with Mom by her black maid and companion, Olivia (Brenda Pressley). In Lili's mind, Nick is the knight who will slay her dragon-mother and rescue her from her Central Park dungeon, which she describes variously as "the river Styx" and, conjuring up a Miltonic Hell, "darkness visible." The paradise of Lili's childhood has been lost; "The American Plan" is about her attempt to re-create it in another relationship. Her histrionic account of the depredations of her life--"I frighten everyone," she says--turns her inconsolability into martyrdom, which, to a narcissist like Nick, is honey to the bee. "I cause happiness," he tells Eva later, after apparently dropping his fiancee for Lili. "That's what I do." He may be lying to Lili about his past, but Lili, daydreaming of an idyllic universe of two, is lying to herself as well. "He's a prince," ...