STAGE REVIEW : ‘Lost Formicans’ Mirrors the Angst of the ‘80s

One way for the playwright to deal with the confusions of his time is to trace them back to a single cause. For Clifford Odets in the ‘30s, the problem was simple: greed. Life mustn’t be “printed on dollar bills.”

For Constance Congdon, author of “Tales of the Lost Formicans” at the Matrix, the problem isn’t simple. She is not sure what has gone wrong in the ‘80s. All she knows is that everything is coming apart, starting with the family. How to convey this? Go with the flow.

Realizing that a play needs a form, Congdon does connect her tales. But very loosely. We are supposedly watching a sort of 3-D video of life on Earth in the late 20th Century, prepared by scientists on another planet several eons down the line.

They know us as the Formicans, a lost tribe who spent Saturday afternoons worshipping at the mall. (The play ends with the mall in flames.) It may be that they had agents among us. It may even be that they helped to drive us crazy.

Congdon has some fun with this Planet X business, linking it to the conspiracy theories that help the credulous keep the faith these days. (Don Schlossman plays an earnest young Formican who points out that J.F.K. was assassinated in a Lincoln convertible. “Think about it.” Hmm.)

But Congdon doesn’t pursue her little green scientists too far. (They don’t have to be played that way for us to see them that way.) Her real concern is for the creatures on their screen. As with “The Skin of Our Teeth,” once you strip away the sideshow, you find a family play.

“Home” is a leitmotif, but the home under observation is on the rocks. Dad is off on some private mental journey of his own, occasioned by Alzheimer’s disease. (Actor Hal Bokar shows how absorbing Dad finds this.) Mother (K Callan, pale as the grave) wishes she had as good an excuse to tune out the real world.

Their two daughters (the conscientious one, Joan McMurtrey, and the rowdy one, Lois Foraker) are suffering Post-Divorce Stress Syndrome, as evidenced by an insane urge to torch Foraker’s ex-husband’s Corvette.

And the teen-age grandson is your typical monster of the malls. Is it his fault that it costs $100 to talk to a buddy in New York for an hour? “I didn’t ask to be born, you know.” (Insufferable boy, and actor Joshua Goddard shows that he could do some real damage, like Cain in “The Skin of Our Teeth.”)

“Tales of the Lost Formicans” inspires the laughter of recognition. Yes, that’s how it is in the late ‘80s, everybody bemoaning the absence of old-fashioned values as they leave the house to torch a Corvette or to meet somebody in a motel. Values are for other people. We have needs.

Yet Congdon doesn’t see her characters as vicious. They’re simply going for the gold of self-realization, as recommended by the ‘60s and ‘70s. But actress McMurtrey, at the center of the play, sees that it doesn’t help to blame Abbie Hoffman or Ronald Reagan or Dr. Ruth for getting us into this mess. As her mother says, nobody’s minding the store any more. We have to make our own moral selections.

McMurtrey doesn’t put this realization into words. It’s not that kind of play. But she does make a journey, with the help of co-directors Lee Shallat and Kristoffer Siegel-Tabori, and this helps to unify a play that is too honest to propose any univocal explanation for the confusions of the day, or any instant remedy for them.

Maybe “instant” is part of the problem. By constructing the play in bits and pieces, Congdon gives us a slight case of information anxiety, surely one of the symptoms of the age. By going with the flow, she has created a play that stays on track. We have beheld her aliens and, lo, they are us.

Plays in repertory with “Better Living” at 7657 Melrose Ave., through Dec. 3. Performances Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays at 8 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 3 p.m. Tickets $12.50. (213) 852-1445. ‘TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS’

Constance Congdon’s play, presented by Actor for Themselves at the Matrix Theatre. Directors Lee Shallat and Kristoffer Siegel-Tabori. Sets and lighting Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio. Costumes Betty Berberian. Music director Nathan Wang. Sound design Kevin Dunayer. Stage manager Jon Tolins. Managing director Darsie Marie. Producer Joseph Stern. Associate artistic director Peggy Shannon. With Don Schlossman, Hal Bokar, Joan McMurtrey, Lois Foraker, Joshua Goddard, K Callan, Steve Pershing and Richard Burns.