[John Guare] is a master of calculated irrelevancy. His is a world of misunderstandings and half-truths, a world of the most astonishingly logical illogicality. Deeply influenced by the theater of the absurd, and playwrights such as Ionesco and N. F. Simpson, Mr. Guare is a most promising young playwright. This double bill ["Cop-Out" and "Home Fires"] is a strange John Guare 1938– © Jerry BauerBroadway debut—a mixture of confidence and diffidence. It is also one of those evenings that, disconcertingly, while full of laughs is eventually unsatisfying.

Mr. Guare's humor is black, but not savage. "Home Fires," the first of the plays, is a wry little sketch about a farcical funeral. It is Armistice Night in 1918. In Mr. Catchpole's funeral parlor a strange family is gathered: Mr. Smith, a policeman with an impeccable Teutonic accent; his daughter, Nell Schmidt, and his son, Rudy Smythe.

The joke of the...