STAGE REVIEW : Crashing Symbols : Guare’s Play Juggles Metaphors, Drops a Few

John Guare is very brave.

Imagine mixing one’s metaphors and doing it by putting three adults and nine--count ‘em, nine--kids on stage. Imagine invoking the gods of wrath, music, Sicily and humor in one off-the-wall swoop. Imagine creating a comedy that turns to parable and tragedy, all of it in roughly 90 engaging minutes. Engaging as opposed to absorbing.

That’s what Guare has done in a bit of whimsy with the improbable title “Four Baboons Adoring the Sun.” It manages to hang together, in its own screwy way, even as Guare and director Peter Hall drop massive clues, like boulders along our path, to make sure we follow their intent.

“Baboons,” which opened Wednesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in Lincoln Center, harks back to the pixilated antics of Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves,” without imitating them. What it enjoys is a spirit similarly freed of convention and a similar level of darkness.

Stockard Channing, fresh from Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation,” and James Naughton, fresh from playing the Chandleresque gumshoe in “City of Angels,” are united here as American archeologists Penny and Philip McKenzie, starting out together on their marriage--the second for each of them--and a Sicilian dig.

It’s summer. Love and hope are in bloom, and they’re expecting their children to visit--five for her, four for him. This will be the first time since they were married that they’ll all be together as a family. They’re braced for the challenge. “Our kids,” they say, “are an unexplored dig.”

It turns out not too bad. For a while. These are bright, outspoken youngsters. Penny renames them all with mythological names. As good parents trying to unite a bunch of kids, the oldest of whom are 13, the effort has its small victories. Penny stages “a sort of Bronze Age Easter egg hunt.” Philip tells them Sicily is “where the gods went on holiday; don’t look at the petrochemical plants.”

Overseeing the whole works is Eros, the golden god of love, performed by Eugene Perry, legs and loins covered in golden vines, who sings all his lines (music by Stephen Edwards). He’s the orchestrator who brings the two oldest children, Wayne and Halcy, closer together than their parents ever intended. In a blindingly miscalculated case of teen-age lust and puppy love, they fitfully emulate Philip and Penny’s romance, triggering a series of tragic events.

One adjusts to the wide mood swings, but the large clues dropped by Guare, encompassing those events in the light of other symbols, are troweled on.

Channing and Naughton are chummy and funny in the early scenes, where the banter and preoccupations are more casual than otherworldly and the repartee mostly clever. She, more than he, has a wry, ironic tolerance that makes every line seem like the bemused reaction of a person once removed from events that directly affect her. There is a splendid exchange of things to share or not share with your children that is at once poetic and wise.

But when things grow darker and more metaphysical, the dialogue is less believable, and the actors cope as best they can, which is not always very well. The kids, however, given their numbers and the confinement of their roles, are pretty terrific, especially Wil Horneff and Angela Goethals as the doomed young lovers.

A key player in this erratic yet frequently entertaining evening of clashing styles is Tony Walton’s remarkable scenic design, aided by Richard Pilbrow’s lighting and Paul Arditti’s sound. The set--a simple circle of sand, backed by a large semi-spherical gong behind a scrim--parts, glows and smokes for earthquakes. Assisted by Wendall K. Harrington’s tenebrous projections, it creates rocky lunar landscapes, murky nether regions and Olympian thrones.

What does it all add up to? Something about opportunities taken and opportunities missed. Something about the inexorability of cycles: living, loving, birthing, dying. Something about the real and emotional temblors that shake up our lives. And something larger. Call it the helpless hunger for divinity. The baboons of the title are mythic creatures dating back to the 14th Dynasty, whose eyes, we’re told by Eros, burned out because they saw their god.

“It was easier for baboons to look into the sun,” Eros tells Penny, “than it was for you to look into the heart of love.”

Guare is not content to be pessimistic. Even among the wreckage of loves lost and lives in shambles, the sun still rises. One can take the play at this level, or one can leave it on another. One woman was heard saying on the way out: “Stanley has it all figured out: Don’t ever take the children on your vacation.”

‘Four Baboons Adoring the Sun’

Eugene Perry: Eros

Stockard Channing: Penny McKenzie

James Naughton: Philip McKenzie

Wil Horneff: Wayne

Michael Shulman: Lyle

Ellen Hamilton Latzen: Sarah

Alex Sobol: Teddy

Angela Goethals: Halcy

Zoe Taleporos: Jane

John Ross: Peter

Kimberly Jean Brown: Robin

Zachary Phillip Solomon: Roger

A Lincoln Center Theater presentation at the Vivian Baumont Theatre. Producers Andre Bishop, Bernard Gersten. Director Peter Hall. Playwright John Guare. Sets Tony Walton. Lights Richard Pilbrow. Costumes Willa Kim. Music Stephen Edwards. Sound Paul Arditti. Projections Wendall K. Harrington. Hair Angela Gari. Production stage manager Thomas A. Kelly. Stage manager Charles Kindl.