HUNGRY HEARTS.(Pen)(Theater review)

Home is not always where the heart is; according to David Marshall Grant's rueful comedy "Pen" (directed by Will Frears, at Playwrights Horizons), sometimes family members can't find their hearts with two hands and a map. The drama here turns on the eponymous pen--a special one, as it happens--which the controlling, pessimistic, wheelchair-bound Helen Bayer (the excellent J. Smith-Cameron), a victim of multiple sclerosis, uses to write while lying down. Her dutiful, gawky son, Matt (Dan McCabe), who has a little problem with kleptomania, has stolen it to fill out his application to the University of Southern California, his dad's alma mater, acceptance to which would take him thousands of miles from this cozy patch of suburban Long Island and from his toxic, symbiotic arrangement with his divorced mother. "It's one thing to steal," Helen says to Matt about the pen. "But to implicate a maid. How low can you get?" The question the play raises is just who here is stealing from whom.

Helen wants her son at home with her. Constantly reminding him of her illness--"When you're crippled, you can have your own remote control"--she smothers him with demands, for food, for physical assistance, for him to fill out an application to the nearby state university at Stony Brook. Helen is funny, she is smart, and she has a sense of progressive liberal righteousness--all of which help her to deceive herself about her own murderous intentions. Envious of her son, she wants to rob him of his future. Matt's upbeat father, Jerry (well played by Reed Birney), a psychologist who is planning a move to the West Coast and is about to publish a self-help book on the subject of "why we can't truly own our own lives," keeps reminding Matt that he's not responsible for his mother. But, of course, Jerry is also trying to own Matt's life. At U.S.C., Matt would be near him and his new fiancee. With all these mixed messages coming at him, it's no wonder that Matt is confused and furious. After one fierce set-to with his mother, he throws a phone at her, then the pen. "Here, take your pen. I give up. Take it. Take my legs. Please. Walk! Go on, walk!" Matt's legs suddenly buckle under him and he crumples, paralyzed, to the ground. As the lights go down on the first act, Helen slowly rises from her wheelchair.

At this point, the play becomes a sort of allegory of psychological projection. The observations are astute; the execution, however, isn't satisfying. Grant hasn't sufficiently explained the rules of his game, and, inevitably, it becomes downright mystifying. Disguised in a wig and sunglasses, Helen seeks out Jerry at their old watering hole, where he tries to pick her up and, in a drunken confession, admits that leaving his crippled wife was "like leaving a wounded animal." "It's not her fault, then. There's hope," Helen says, encouraging him to return to his family for New Year's Eve. This and the subsequent psychological reversals beggar the imagination, even though they are served up with some good lines. "My father's a Jew, my mother's a Wasp," the tipsy Jerry tells Helen. "I feel nothing, but I feel guilty about it." As I left the show, confounded by the play's odd construction, I was reminded of one of its better apercus: "Men don't have second thoughts. We just have the first one over and over again."

"I'm supposed to leave you," Matt tells his mother when he finally asserts his own desires and his mental health. But when it's the parents who do the leaving, it's a different story. "The shadow of the crib makes an enormous cage / upon the wall," the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote in "Songs for a Colored Singer." And certainly Bishop, one of the twentieth century's most renowned poets, was imprisoned by the pall of her father's death, when she was only eight months old, and of her mother's retreat into madness. (After the age of five, she never saw her mother again.) A sickly child, Bishop was raised by relatives. "I was always sort of a guest, and I think I've always felt like that," she said. She once told Robert Lowell, "When you write my epitaph, you must say I ...