STAGE REVIEW : Baitz Casts Wide Net in ‘End of the Day’

Perhaps no playwright in recent memory has burst onto the local scene with the full-blown maturity of Jon Robin Baitz. With two major plays in four years, he has become one of the serious hopes of the theater--a literate master of the sort of rich naturalistic plays we didn’t even know we were missing until we found them again.

From the troubled isolation of white academics in South Africa in “The Film Society” to the unraveling New York publishing family in “The Substance of Fire,” his plays have been uncompromising, passionate and, considering that he just turned 30, astoundingly wise.

So, naturally, just as we were getting fixed on the notion of Baitz--whose writing career started and was nurtured in Los Angeles--as the savior of the linear, well-made play of ideas, he decides to stretch out. “The End of the Day,” currently at Playwrights Horizons, is his first stage work here to experiment with a mixture of styles--absurdity, black comedy, farce and the heavy whiff of contemporary parable--and with multiple locations--from Malibu to Belgrave Square to a medical clinic in Southern California.

This also is, unfortunately, the only Baitz to be staged here that lacks focus, that feels overloaded, unsteady and immature compared to the others. The cast is a pleasure--especially Roger Rees and Nancy Marchand. But the tone of Mark Lamos’ production is uncertain, and for much of the evening we sit there wondering where, exactly, we are being taken.

And, yet, it’s a raucous ride of hairpin curves--and, despite the wrong turns, one worth taking. Baitz is so smart, so gloriously verbal and so full of ideas that we feel we’re inside a pinball machine, bouncing off flashes of light and being flipped against thoughts that may, or may not, connect to the next ones. Baitz does tie things together with a final ravishing flourish, but the payoff, bright as it is, is more the sum of some of its parts than a cohesive conclusion of all that has gone before.

Rees plays Graydon Massey, a cad and a bounder, a British upper-class expatriate who used his wife’s Jewish mobster family to pay his way through medical school, set him up as a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, then retrain him in oncology. Rees, of course, was the title character in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s epic “Nicholas Nickleby,” in which we followed him, a force of pure goodness, through a series of misadventures.

Now Rees plays a force of evil, a charismatic serpent who slides through a series of misadventures with cold eyes burning, clammy skin sweating and a handsome face with bones too close to the skin.

The flip is a treat. We first meet Graydon in front of a triple mirror in Malibu, 1986, unctuously preening for his speech as a new American citizen. As he switches ties, we learn much of what we need to know about “what it means to be an American”--in this country, “there’s nothing to stop you from coming back for seconds.”

The next scene is 1992, at a run-down county clinic. Graydon, still in his pastel linen suit, is down but not quite out, barking insults at the overworked staff with his bemused and cruel elan.

Graydon is bad, the world is rotten, everyone he knows is terrible--even those who seem to be trying to do something decent--and “nothing works.” His gold-chained, vulgarian father-in-law (Paul Sparer) wants his money back. His ditz of a Mafia-princess wife (Jean Smart) wants Graydon back. A school chum (Philip Kerr) wants him for a big drug deal, to which Baitz has Graydon respond, perfectly: “That’s totally immoral--and utterly passe.” Big nurse (Marchand) wants his neck, and a sick patient (John Benjamin), well, might have AIDS, might have cancer, but definitely is carrying a message about what happens “at the end of the day” if you’re a bad guy who has to die alone.

Baitz repeats that concern frequently, which, since it’s also the play’s title, must be his point. Graydon is haunted by his father, a con man who killed himself alone. Ultimately, as Graydon puts all the corruption of his worlds together into one smashingly successful con, he exults, “We are linked, and we all have to give, or, at the end of the day, we are nothing!”

Until then, however, there are these actors, who double as characters in Los Angeles and London. Marchand is a treasure, both as the no-nonsense nurse and Graydon’s English mother. She and Sparer, as Uncle Swifty, play the tough if lost Thatcherite upper-class capitalists as a combination of Noel Coward and the Munsters. Smart is delicious as Graydon’s British betrothed, Lady Stoat, her love “fueled” by his contempt for her.

Oddly, Lamos doesn’t nail the L.A. characters with the same ruthless originality he brings to the British--though the offhand, breezy references to outlandish L.A. cuisine are endearing. For all the cleverness, there is an apocalyptic hopelessness, an unrelieved cynicism about the way things work--or fail to work. Baitz throws an awfully wide net that tries, with varying success, to catch Los Angeles, London, the health-care system, the mob, the film industry, art world, disillusioned lefties, lost fathers, loveless mothers, disposable wives, even the selfishness of the charitable.

As Graydon complains to his dead father: “It’s so much work to keep the balls in the air.” For the first time, we can feel Baitz working too hard. We’re not used to seeing him sweat.