STAGE REVIEW : Richly Layered, Powerful ‘Stories’

If the Mark Taper Forum had wanted to give itself a significant anniversary present, it could hardly do better than emulate some of the stirring successes of its past. Not self-consciously. Not as in trying to. But as in finding a richly layered new play that it could get behind with a solid cast, a fine design team and no fanfare beyond the one naturally generated by good writing.

Sybille Pearson’s “Unfinished Stories,” seen at a Wednesday preview, is that play--not because it happens to be an often gripping investigation of painful four-way family relationships, but because it so brilliantly illuminates an entire universe of reasons why.

As conceptually old-fashioned as plays come, the momentum of this rigorous study in five scenes never breaks. (It is mercifully played without an intermission, despite its nearly two-hour length.)

Yes, this new play has an agenda that goes beyond its four characters, and yes, that agenda is profoundly political. But Pearson’s triumph is that the politics are causal. They propel behavior, instead of the other way around. And that behavior is as integral to character and dynamics as the space these four people share.

The literal space they share is a modest Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan and the time is now. The philosophical space they share sweeps through the century, with its cultural demolition derbies.

“They” are Walter (Joseph Wiseman), a deeply principled German-Jewish doctor, well along in years, who left Germany when Hitler came to power; his grandson Daniel (Christopher Collet), a scruffy American youth who drives a cab in Manhattan and whose life has gone around in circles; Daniel’s Irish mother, Gaby (Fionnula Flanagan), whose bitter passions, political and other, are as fiery as her head of hair; and Daniel’s father, Yves (Hal Linden), Walter’s son, Gaby’s ex-husband, a professional actor whose self-protective grandiloquence won’t let you forget it.

The divorce is just a year old and the gashes still smart, particularly since Yves has remarried. His new wife is a lawyer who has the added bad taste of being a much younger woman. She’s now pregnant as well, the result of a honeymoon in Paris where Yves himself was born (a stop on his parents’ flight from Hitler’s storm troopers). This explains his French name.

Pearson’s plot is the machinery behind her point. What keeps us in thrall is the emotional interaction in the course of 48 hours during which everyone is reaching out to everyone else across seemingly unbridgeable cultural, conjugal and generational gulfs.

Walter’s dominance of this household through sheer presence and authority has dwarfed his son’s ability to believe in himself. So why does Yves hang around there, with a son he has alienated, an ex-wife who doesn’t need to hear about his newly found happiness and a father who barely gives him the time of day? Plainly, because he must. There are not only unfinished stories here, but unfinished business as well.

Linden plays Yves with every layer in place. His pomposity is straightforward and so insecure that we cannot dislike him. Each gesture begs you to love him. And when he is finally able to reach across the pain and touch his son as his father has finally touched him, we can accept the difficulty and catharsis of the transaction.

But credit must be shared by all: by Wiseman, who turns in a masterful performance as the shuffling patriarch whose body is breaking down, but whose mind is as exacting as ever, and whose perceived mission is to cling to a cultural past consumed by the flames of the Holocaust; by Collet, whose Daniel is an uneasy young man in search of identity. He straddles the generational chasm to love a grandfather he admires but does not understand, reuniting him in the end with a father he understands and loves but cannot admire.

Such adversity between fathers and sons are the essence of this play, which partly explains why Gaby remains such an outsider. Stuck with this least developed character, Flanagan nevertheless gives Gaby energy and introspection. But she deserves to be more than a leftover pamphleteer from the ‘60s, and Pearson could do worse than deepen this portrait.

What Pearson’s got dead right is the way these people talk to each other, scream at each other, dodging truths, blurting them out, salving wounds, covering them up with irony, bitterness or humor. These are explosive, visceral connections.

In the Taper’s 25th anniversary season, nothing could be more welcome than a play so unmasked and raw, reminiscent of this theater’s earliest high-water marks (Christopher Hampton’s “Savages,” Michael Cristofer’s “Black Angel”), in which the conscience probing was also just as inward.

It is especially fitting that these were staged by the Taper’s artistic director, Gordon Davidson, who has staged “Unfinished Stories” with a measured, unwavering hand that catches the fullness of the play’s intelligence and discordant music without for an instant backing away from its dissonant truths.

The designing team for “Unfinished Stories” also reaches well into the Taper’s past. Peter Wexler has provided the spacious, mildly cluttered Upper West Side apartment, lit with appropriate dinginess by Martin Aronstein. Csilla Marki designed the costumes and Jon Gottlieb the sound, which on occasion could be clearer.

“Unfinished Stories,” Mark Taper Forum, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends July 26. $26-$32; (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000, TDD (213) 680-4017. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

Joseph Wiseman: Walter

Christopher Collet: Daniel

Fionnula Flanagan: Gaby

Hal Linden: Yves

A Center Theatre Group-Mark Taper Forum presentation. Director Gordon Davidson. Playwright Sybille Pearson. Sets Peter Wexler. Lights Martin Aronstein. Costumes Csilla Marki. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Dramaturg Leon Katz. Production stage manager Mary K. Klinger. Stage manager Elsbeth M. Collins.