John Guare is still at sea in "Gardenia."… It's hard to accept that the author of this emotionally blocked, almost willfully undramatic work is the man who wrote "The House of Blue Leaves," "Landscape of the Body" and the screenplay for "Atlantic City." Sad to say, it is all too easy to believe that "Gardenia" comes from the playwright who earlier this season unveiled "Lydie Breeze."

Mr. Guare's new play is about the same 19th-century characters as its immediate predecessor, and the two dramas are related in perhaps more ways than the author might wish. "Gardenia" is even weaker than "Lydie Breeze" but, distressingly enough, it manages to diminish the earlier play, such as it was, retroactively.

In "Lydie," we visited a Nantucket beach house full of characters whose lives had been wrecked years earlier—after a post-Civil War Utopian commune had failed and its galvanizing queen bee...