BLOWING SMOKE.

Like all poisoned chalices, Neil LaBute's "Wrecks" (directed by the playwright, at the Public) isn't what it seems. Before the lights go up on this superb and subversive monologue, the butterscotch sound of Nat King Cole's romantic anthems--"Stay As Sweet As You Are," "When I Fall in Love," "Stardust"--plays over a funeral scene. In a set subtly designed by Klara Zieglerova, a large black casket with a wreath of white flowers rests upstage, framed by an arch onto which is projected a gigantic blowup of a woman's face. (The same photograph rests on a table in front of the coffin.) Beyond the arch is another well-lit area, from which we occasionally hear the sounds of a milling crowd of mourners. The topography and the black-and-white design cunningly suggest the psychic division in the gaunt, chain-smoking widower Edward Carr (the compelling Ed Harris), who stands before us on the painted gray floor, taking drags on a cigarette and waving away the smoke screen before he speaks--a semaphore that, like everything else here, is emblematic of the self-destructiveness to come. Carr's first words are about the nature of habit: "Once you give yourself over to something, it's, well . . . it's a devil of a deal to beat it." Carr is talking about smoking; LaBute is not. The play is about self-deception; it is also, as its punning title implies, a retelling of Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex." In LaBute's story, however, Carr doesn't gouge out his eyes; he renders himself psychologically blind by cutting himself off from his feelings.

Carr tells us that he was an orphan, reared in a series of foster homes. Puffing away, he extolls his late wife of thirty years, Mary Jo, or Jo-Jo--recounting her beauty, the role he played in the breakup of her former marriage, the classic-car-rental business ("the little empire") that he and Jo-Jo built together, the safe harbor of their hard-won relationship. Almost casually he lets slip that he himself has only eight months to live. He seems curiously detached about his death, as well as about hers. "They're all crying now, sure," he says of the other mourners. "Why not? They got an audience. . . . Not me, though, no thank you." It was Jo-Jo, he adds, who taught him how to feel. "I do it in my own time, within the privacy of my own home." And he ponders the irony of Jo-Jo, who was fifteen years his senior, having died first. "Me smoking like a Christmas stove all my life, and she's the one who goes and gets cancer," he says.

Jo-Jo, the play suggests, was killed by a lifetime of Carr's secondhand smoke. Carr does not see this. Casting himself as a conservative straight shooter, a bit of a prude who doesn't even like to say the word "fuck," he shows us that he is pathologically unable to accept his own negative feelings. He claims that when he got the news of Jo-Jo's cancer, he felt, "I don't know, almost . . . elated." He continues, "Now I was certain that I'd be able to be there with her, every day, for the rest of her life." Carr has an almost herculean capacity for denial. He idealizes Jo-Jo, whom he refers to variously as "an absolute angel," a "goddess," "a pearl that fell to this planet like some tear outta the eye of almighty Christ himself." His words, which are meant to attest to a grand passion, reveal instead a passion of an altogether different kind: a passion for ignorance. The hatred he really feels for Jo-Jo and for himself is projected onto his cigarettes, which he calls, significantly, "insidious little pricks that deserve the hatred and fear we heap on 'em." He is not just smoking but also, rhetorically speaking, blowing smoke. "Just trying to be honest here," he tells us at the opening. "To be open. Vulnerable. In touch with your emotions, and, you know . . . all that other crap."

In a psychological sense, "Wrecks" is really a ghost story. Jo-Jo, Carr tells us, was haunted; she "spent . . . her free time regretting her life--first half of it anyway, before she met me--wishing it'd turned out differently." Carr, for his part, is ...