"I was a man who ached for a utopia," says Joshua Hickman in John Guare's new play, "Lydie Breeze." Everyone in Guare's lyrical, elegiac, melodramatic, funny, sorrowing and celebratory play has ached for a utopia of one sort or another: the primal utopia of parental connection, the sentimental utopia of romantic love, the civic utopia of sharing and brotherhood. "Lydie Breeze" is about these aches, which are never to be assuaged, and about these utopias, which are never to be attained. The biggest ache of all belongs not to any of the characters but to America itself, which is in a way the protagonist in this play that reflects the boom-and-bust cycle of American dreams.

The gothic strain has always been a key element in John Guare's sensibility, and here that strain is reinforced by his creation of a web of corrupted relationships personifying the interlocking, interbreeding corruptions...