THE WAR ROOM.

Just as Hollywood has its star paradigms--Scarlett Johansson, for instance, is a direct descendant of Veronica Lake--the contemporary American theatre offers audiences a comfortable degree of familiarity. Would Richard Greenberg's class- and gender-obsessed dramas ring as many bells with producers and audiences had William Inge not filled the stage with similar issues in the nineteen-fifties and sixties? And where would Paul Rudnick be without the well-made gags masquerading as plays which George S. Kaufman, with Edna Ferber or Moss Hart, and other polite drawing-room anarchists wrote in the thirties, in an effort to educate the populace? In general, our commercial theatre is less accepting of the new than of its opposite, nostalgia. And with that tendency come--for the playwright writing in the safety zone--certain rewards: more frequent productions, bigger budgets, larger audiences, and greater fame.

Although Eve Ensler, with her talk of vaginas, flabby stomachs, genocide, and, now, in "The Treatment" (opening the Culture Project's IMPACT Festival), government brainwashing and post-traumatic stress disorder, is often perceived as "radical," the fifty-three-year-old writer and performer has become her generation's Lillian Hellman. Ensler's intriguing, tender, and often tiresome work recalls not Hellman's psychologically astute and dramatically compelling "Toys in the Attic" (1960) period but her dull 1941 anti-Fascist melodrama "Watch on the Rhine." Ensler, who made her name in 1996, with the Obie Award-winning piece "The Vagina Monologues," mines the same self-important sense of social urgency and political regret as her predecessor. Even in her best work--"The Good Body" (2004), for instance--we have the playwright as warmhearted nag, intent on telling us where we have gone wrong. One suspects that if Ensler had nothing to complain about she would have nothing to say. She writes because life is filled with causes.

In "The Treatment," Ensler gives us the ravages of war. The play's battlefield is a grim office in which Man (Dylan McDermott), a war veteran, and Woman (Portia), a military psychiatrist, face off in a series of short scenes. At the start, Man confesses that it was his wife who insisted that he seek professional help. Troubled by nightmares and insomnia, by having survived a war that his nerves did not, Man is a jangle of indecision, a walking trauma, bruised by the indescribable destruction and the random use of force he has witnessed and taken part in. He is a self without an "I." As Woman draws him out with--at first--inquisitive reasonableness, Man assumes that she is also drawing closer to him, if only because he wants her to. McDermott's physical awkwardness and largely braying vocal tone are right for the part. He struts through the play's "No Exit" atmosphere like a boy playing at war. Gradually, though, Ensler makes it clear that Man's hypermasculinity is just another costume; his hairy chest is a pelt obscuring his uncertain heart. Man finds himself, in the course of several fairly predictable interviews, slowly becoming more attracted to Woman. He cannot resist her interest in finding out who he is, even as he makes her stand for something other than herself. At times, he treats her like a slattern whom he can conquer through brute force; at others, he collapses in her lap like a baby. (McDermott would make a fine Brick in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.")

Throughout, Portia responds to McDermott's intense energy and despair with stoicism. Woman cannot break through her role--her buttoned-up reserve--because she has a job to do, for the military. Is Man a threat to national security? To her? But what is she? The Army has defined her. Even as Man locks his lips onto hers, she sways but does not bend. She possesses all the self-awareness that Man lacks. She cannot allow her sensuality to take precedence over her good ...