STAGE REVIEW : MORE UNEASY LAUGHTER FROM GUARE

No American playwright has been able to bring laughter and terror into closer proximity than John Guare. His humor in “Bosoms and Neglect,” at the Odyssey Theatre, is like a flurry of razor cuts, superficially sensational and bloody.

Guare’s “House of Blue Leaves” gave a ghastly illumination to the term “to die laughing.” In “Bosoms and Neglect” everybody gets out alive. But here we have once again a wacko matriarch and the sense of normality--which we’ll define here as a reasonably sensible hold on oneself and one’s life--as a distinctly skittish thing.

“Bosoms and Neglect” is a fairly literal title. In scene one, Scooper (Sam Anderson) is imploring his addled 83-year-old mother Henny (Frances Bay) to get medical treatment for her complaints. She tells him her bladder has fallen out, and shows him a breast eaten open by cancer. In Scooper’s nerve-strung body you read the question, “How can anyone deal with this?”

Scene II finds Scooper in the book-lined apartment of a woman named Deirdre (Andra Millian). Both of them share the same psychoanalyst, but it’s August, the cruelest month, and the analyst is on vacation. Scooper and Deirdre. inflict their miseries on each other and Guare has great fun scoring the conceits of analysis, before we see that these delicate, damaged two are competing for the same symbolic father.

Books are their protective shields. Their ecstasy comes at cutting open an original bound volume of Valery. But that’s not enough to divert their repressed fury; their frustration is so great that they do physical damage to each other.

The last scene, in Henny’s hospital room, is a great set piece reminiscent of Anouilh’s “Waltz of the Toreadors,” where a bedridden woman wields awesome power. She’s blind, surgically impaired, but just as elusive and feisty as ever--a living series of plaintive non sequiturs, a mother whose heart no son can quarry.

Beneath its quirky surface, “Bosoms and Neglect” tells us that unrequited love between children and parents is potentially more catastrophic than it is between lovers. But it also shows us how no moral or message or insight is enough to maintain the godawful slipperiness of our emotional equilibrium. With Guare the line between insanity and reason flickers like a hairline cut on an old film. That’s what makes his comedy so special.

In Ron Sossi’s production, Anderson’s gaunt face reflects Scooper’s nervous exhaustion, and the tautness of Millian’s arms clue us to Deirdre’s formidable anxieties. But it’s a truism of performance that if you start out too high, you have no place to go. The scene between Anderson and Millian doesn’t breathe Guare’s loopiness and stealth.

When Frances Bay is on, however, everything comes into focus. She makes Henny’s eccentricity just as plausible as it would be when we look at someone and find ourselves wondering, “Did she really say that?” Bay has the sense to know that playing a good part is like riding a thoroughbred--you’re guiding a force. By the end, we’re face to face with Guare’s notion of life as a comic mess.

Performances Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., 7 p.m. Sundays at Odyssey II, 12111 Ohio Ave., West Los Angeles, (213) 826-1626.