Two Who Are On Their Way

When a writer for the stage reveals great promise but has not yet produced fully satisfying work, old hands are apt to remark, “I’m not sure there’s a play here, but there’s certainly a playwright.” Just such tempered optimism is being triggered right now by two emotionally intense, fiercely funny and sadly flawed works by dramatists in their early 30s. One writer — Howard Korder — has the slam-bang dialogue and macho preoccupations of a David Mamet in training. The other — Jon Robin Baitz — can infuse domestic drama with the burdens of history in the fashion of a budding Arthur Miller. But neither can yet write two cumulative and cohesive acts. In each of their current offerings, one act sings, the other doesn’t.

Korder first showed talent with 1987’s Fun, a teenage boy’s nihilist spree, and burst into prominence in 1988 with Boys’ Life, a Mametian glimpse of postadolescent rituals of drinking, puking, courting and infidelity. In Search and Destroy, now on Broadway, he looks at men his own age who have achieved material success but feel an inner hollowness. They seek cures ranging from ritual maleness a la Iron John to shedding their ties and common sense in reckless crusades for adventure. The central character, played by film actor Griffin Dunne, reacts to a busted marriage and a Florida income tax problem by turning to a trio of cliche badass pursuits: cross-country wandering (the show’s sole set is a highway), crime (involving, naturally, suitcases of white powder) and moviemaking. Of these, Korder presents the cinema as the most corrupt; it takes an impromptu murder to get the antihero really launched as a mogul.

The action is episodic, and most characters are fleeting, placing more stress on Dunne’s performance than his lightweight, ingratiating style can bear. The first act is expository and lamely comic, acutely lacking the menace and madness that make the second act crackle. Sometimes the play is a chilling rumination on ’80s greed. Sometimes it’s merely upper Miami Vice. In either vein, it is supremely cynical. Korder asserts with equal force that run-amuck individualism is appalling and that it is the one sure path to triumph.

Baitz came to notice in Los Angeles in 1987 and off-Broadway the next year with The Film Society, a story of a failed teacher in South Africa, where the writer spent much of his youth. His latest effort, The Substance of Fire, is at Lincoln Center after a sold-out run at the smaller Playwrights Horizons. Structurally, the problems are the opposite of the Korder play’s. The first half, about a family dispute over a publishing empire, surges with believable life. The second half, about the clan’s Holocaust-scarred patriarch, clanks with calculation.

The pieces fit logically. Three yuppieish children who ungratefully depose their father in the interest of fiscal stability are stand-ins for the whole indulged baby-boom generation. The burnt-out father, who obsesses about the past and about a supposed universal abandonment of standards, epitomizes a dying elitist culture. But while the children emerge with convincing particularity, all Ron Rifkin’s fiery righteousness and icy brilliance cannot make plausible the contrived second act, which centers on the father’s buying and burning an original painting by Hitler.

Neither play is memorable, although Korder’s might make a lively movie. But each is an exciting signpost toward the emergence of a major voice. And unlike the upcoming Broadway nostalgia of such veterans as Neil Simon, Herb Gardner and August Wilson, each is piercingly focused on the world we live in today.