FAR EAST

In America, 1954 was the year that gave the final pin-prick to the balloon of euphoria that followed the allied victory in World War II.

The Korean War had not ended in the expected triumph and, on the home front, a zealot senator from Wisconsin was setting a paranoid tone for the nation with the witch hunt called the McCarthy hearings.

It was a time when many Americans were beholden to a host of ingrained social conventions and bias (not the least among them, racial and ethic prejudice). But it was also a time of alienation, when people began to feel vaguely betrayed by these premade definitions of what a man is and what a woman is.

This is the backdrop to A.R. Gurney's "Far East," a play that follows four people as they strain against the conventions of their society and cast about for ways to break away to at least a marginal freedom.

By setting the play in Japan at the end of the Korean War, the Buffalo-born Gurney has created something of a laboratory situation for the action - a very elegant laboratory in the playwright's ingenious structuring of the play. Removed from the immediate pressure of daily life in America proper, the characters carry within themselves an American ideal. How each character measures, adjusts and censures his or her behavior in relation to this ideal is the dramatic substance of the play.

Gurney further stresses the burden of convention on the four characters by making them Navy people. Sparky Watts (Scott Bowman) is a young lieutenant, a 90-day wonder from officers training school, who is looked at with friendly skepticism by Capt. James Anderson (Curt Karibalis). The captain's wife, Julie (Mary Kay Adams), struggles with the restraints put on her gender and the limits of her marriage imposed by her husband's military machismo. Sparky's bunkmate, Bob Munger (Harry Carnahan), is even worse off, eventually suffering a censure from the Navy that will alter his entire life.

The crux of the plot is that Sparky is in love with a Japanese woman (an off-stage character) and nobody, including his wealthy and bigoted parents back in Milwaukee, likes it. When Julie - who turns out to be a close friend of Sparky's aunt - begins meddling, some very affecting scenes between Bowman and Adams ensue. Less convincing are the guy-to-guy meetings between the captain and lieutenant in which Gurney demonstrates, with jokey lines, that sex lies behind male derring-do.

Gurney knows full well such revelations as the pervasiveness of sexuality in ordinary human affairs is a commonplace observation. What he is trying to do throughout "Far East" is attempt the re-presentation of such ideas - ideas that were pretty extreme for the characters he creates - much as they might have been expressed in 1954. This isn't merely historical fidelity, but a neat stacking of social convention on social convention so the smallest deviation from the norm will leap out at us.