You cannot build a serviceable bridge out of flowers unless you are an ant; and Lanford Wilson's vocabulary of freaks, sensitive and even charming as it may be, is not the right material to construct the history of a decade….

["The Fifth of July"] attempts to reflect upon what the 70's have made of the 60's. What is left, the question goes and not for the first time, of the impassioned spirit of the marches and the flower-children.

Mr. Wilson's talent is for the frail oddities of life, for waifs who gather in a haze of intersecting fantasies. The intersections are often pretty and whimsical; they have a humor and wryness that can compensate for the fact that the melancholy that goes with it is rather vapid and loose….

Mr. Wilson has assembled a stageful of luminous freaks. Some of them are tiresome and familiar, but several have...