Garbage men The Dazzle delivers in Stoneham BY CAROLYN CLAY
	The Dazzle By Richard Greenberg. Directed by Weylin Symes. Set by Gianni Downs. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Lighting by Shelby O’Clair. Sound by Jason Landry. With Neil Casey, Anne Gottlieb, and Bill Mootos. At Stoneham Theatre through February 8.

There’s mess, and then there’s mess. When an anonymous report of a dead man in a tumbledown uptown manse brought rescue workers to the Harlem home of Langley and Homer Collyer in 1947, they found both occupants decomposing amid the 136 tons of detritus they had tucked away over the years. You now know about as much as playwright Richard Greenberg did about the Collyer brothers when he sat down to stretch his play The Dazzle across the remains of the eccentric, reclusive, Columbia-educated scions of a once-wealthy clan, who had forsaken life for "duffel."

In his elegant, mordant, if somewhat schizophrenic play, Greenberg uses the Collyers as the basis for a contemplation of time: what one does with it, or doesn’t, as it passes. Greenberg’s music- and object-obsessed Langley can spend a day meditating on a thread. Hypersensitive and disconnected, he lives a life of "piecemeal intensities," wary of event. The bookish Homer, by contrast, longs for plot and incident to invade their shared domain. To that end, he encourages the play’s invented character, heiress Milly Ashmore, who has taken a shine to Langley and is regarded by Homer as a potential "enzyme" to catalyze change in their static, symbiotic lives — not to mention as a cash cow.

A Tony winner for the rhapsodic 2003 baseball comedy, Take Me Out, Greenberg won an Outer Critics Circle Award for The Dazzle, which debuted Off Broadway in 2002 and is, in this solid Stoneham Theatre production, in its area premiere. Intelligent, literate, and touching, the play is nonetheless an odd one: its two acts, though they field the same threesome, are quite different in tone.

Act one takes place at the turn of the 20th century and finds the Collyers not yet fully captive to their neuroses and collectibles. (In the words of the play, they are "beside the pale, not yet beyond it.") Here the brothers sport tuxedoes and dressing gowns, and Greenberg puts an Oscar Wilde sheen on borderline autism (Langley’s). There’s even a hostile tea scene redolent of The Importance of Being Earnest. After intermission, it’s 30 years later, the junk is piled higher than the barricades of Les Misérables, and the once epigrammatically waspish brothers have wandered into Beckett country. They have become a junk-piling Vladimir and Estragon, reduced to an elemental vaudeville of bad stew and absurd spats. Like Godot’s Pozzo and Lucky, Milly returns unexpectedly and much changed, trailing tragedy. And Homer, aping Beckett’s slave driver, not to mention his ancient-Greek-poet namesake, has gone blind. "Literature insists on itself," he observes, shuffling but still acerb. Langley, waxing ecstatic about the infrastructure of a pine needle, hadn’t noticed.

In Weylin Symes’s surefooted production, the accouterments, even in act one, hover on the border between spiffy and shabby. By act two, set designer Gianni Downs has turned the Collyer parlor into a Victorian booby trap, a barely passable terrain of layered, teetering heaps of broken furniture and moldering junk. Before the final scene, Casey’s Langley, working in the dark to the chamber music that’s laced through the production, rigs what looks like a room-sized crossbow against potential intruders. Indeed, the real Langley was felled by a Rube Goldberg device of his own making, which he inadvertently triggered, bringing down an avalanche of garbage.

You do wonder whether, somewhere in that nest of crap, there might be buried better wigs than the Fauntleroy-ish one Langley sports in act one or the brittle Beckett-character-on-a-bad-hair-day tangle that Milly wears in act two. But the reliable Gail Astrid Buckley provides delectable period finery for Gottlieb, including a blue-silk number from which, in the better days of act one, she unwraps herself like a gift.

Neil Casey proves an aptly myopic Langley, excruciatingly pained by a note he claims is a 64th-tone flat but as inured to Milly’s bared breasts as to Homer’s admonitions. Casey has to cope with one too many tragicomic swoons in act two, but he does a marvelous job marrying Langley’s pinpoint enthusiasm to his broadband indifference. Bill Mootos makes a more studied attempt to age Homer, who moves from suave if slightly manic manipulation to despair tempered by an almost ghoulish need for narrative. When the suddenly materialized Milly tells her lurid tale of woe, he at once sympathizes and declares it "a corker." And Gottlieb is a charming, complicit Milly, seemingly unfazed by the brothers’ never-consummated plan to make her a codicil to their strange romance.