A play that begins as a puzzle remains one

Out of it emerges the plot of “Nantucket Sleigh Ride,” the newish John Guare play that opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Monday.

That plot can hardly be summarized, let alone spoiled; it’s a shaggy whale story devised to defy all logic but a dream’s. Also like a dream, it almost instantly dissolves in the light.

But out of respect for Guare’s nearly five decades of marvelous invention — “The House of Blue Leaves,” “Six Degrees of Separation,” “Landscape of the Body” and the “Atlantic City” screenplay among the results — let’s put this dream on the couch and see what it’s trying to tell us.

The 2010 crossword throws Gowery (John Larroquette) back to the summer of 1975. Flush with money from “Internal Structure of Stars,” his sole hit, he has recently bought, sight unseen, a house on Nantucket as an investment property. The discovery of a pedophile pornography ring operating there forces him to the island and into a mystery that will eventually involve not only Borges but also Magritte, “Jaws,” a Roman Polanski remake of Hitchcock’s “Suspicion,” a possible murder, two weird children, frozen Walt Disney and an electrocuted lobster.

For it turns out that Gowery has deeply offended some of the locals, whose amateur production of “Internal Structure of Stars” he rudely refused to attend the previous winter. The disappointed actors and director, seeking revenge, eventually strip him of his wallet, his white suit, his anxiety meds and his career. Nevertheless, this being a comedy, he emerges from the adventure ahead, with one dollar’s profit, a woman who will become his life companion and a tale he will one day fashion like a Möbius strip into “the greatest play since Aeschylus” — which is to say, the one we’re seeing.

A work that announces itself as the result of its own plot is a riddle at risk of an anticlimax, but in this pronouncement, at any rate, the author is joking. Still, the story’s details and absurdities clearly have personal resonance for Guare, whose name could easily be mispronounced as Gowery. He, too, was once the answer to a Times crossword clue; he, too, met his wife on Nantucket in August 1975. A trilogy of his earlier plays was set there.

As this suggests, “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” is interested in how we make stories of ourselves, but also in how we forget or revise them. Its particular focus is the havoc played by childhood memory. “Internal Structure of Stars” is Gowery’s maudlin autobiographical tale of abandonment at 11 by his tubercular parents. The Nantucket adventure reconstitutes the theme by bringing him in contact with the daughter (Clea Alsip) and grandchildren (Adam Chanler-Berat and Grace Rex) of a beloved author whose children’s books also involve abandonment.

This is where Disney, “the legal guardian of every child in the universe,” fits in, if anything can be said to fit into a play that begins with a puzzle and willfully remains one.

What Guare seems to be after is a dramaturgy that is absurdist not for its own sake but as a kind of last-ditch naturalism, replicating the absurdity of actual life with all its serendipities, hyperlinks, potholes and misprisions. He is one of our few major dramatists who dares to make plays from the kinds of anecdotes about which we say at cocktail parties: “If this were a play, you’d never believe it.”

But if Guare’s earlier excursions in the anecdotal style made you feel like guests at just such a party, “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” (like “A Free Man of Color” in 2010) makes you feel as if you’re stranded at one, in a corner with a drunk. Despite some heavy pruning and reshaping since it was first produced (under the title “Are You There, McPhee?”) at the McCarter Theater in 2012, it remains, in Jerry Zaks’s zippy, overbright staging for Lincoln Center Theater, both hermitic and hermetic: obscure and airless.

That’s not a great environment for audiences — or actors — to thrive in. Larroquette has the right combination of swagger and self-doubt but spends most of the play nursing the harried affect of someone running for a bus that keeps shutting its doors every time he catches up. The rest of the cast, which includes several experienced farceurs and shape-shifters, is forced into more or less impossible contortions of whimsy, a job for which only Douglas Sills (as a shrink, the children’s father and Disney) seems factory-equipped.

Still, you may get a shiver of the dark anxiety hiding in the writing as a ghost hides in a child’s crowded closet: Without other people to confirm your identity, you have none. Nor is that an anxiety that, for a playwright, gets better with age. Guare is 81, and while “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” is hardly valedictory, it does betray doubts about continuing fecundity.

“Lightning struck me once,” Gowery says with an equanimity the play proceeds to topple. “That’s once more than it strikes most people.” Another character helpfully points out that Verdi’s “Otello” and “Falstaff” were written when the composer was nearing 90 — which, perhaps deliberately, is at least a decade off.

Though I find his plays fresher when he writes for female protagonists instead of male ones — the women here are basically tchotchkes — Guare need not have worried about the friskiness of his imagination or the seaworthiness of his craft. They’re fine.

“Nantucket Sleigh Ride,” it seems to me, is simply a story that didn’t want to be caught. Even the title seems to know it: It’s a local term for what happens when a whaler harpoons a whale. After hours or days of wild exertion, one or the other winds up dead.

Or sometimes the audience does.

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Production Notes:

“Nantucket Sleigh Ride”

Through May 5 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, lct.org.

Running time: 2 hours.

Credits: By John Guare; directed by Jerry Zaks; sets and projections by David Gallo; costumes by Emily Rebholz; lighting by Howell Binkley; music and sound by Mark Bennett; stage manager, Janet Takami; dramaturge, Anne Cattaneo; general manager, Jessica Niebanck; production manager, Paul Smithyman. Presented by Lincoln Center Theater, André Bishop, producing artistic director, Adam Siegel, managing director, Hattie K. Jutagir, executive director of development and planning.

Cast: Clea Alsip, Tina Benko, Adam Chanler-Berat, Jordan Gelber, Germán Jaramillo, John Larroquette, Grace Rex, Stacey Sargeant, Douglas Sills and Will Swenson.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.