[For many years the chief film critic of The New York Times, Canby is also a novelist, playwright, and theater critic. In the following, he offers a favorable review of The Young Man from Atlanta, noting Foote's focus on the American dream, homosexuality, grief, and family dynamics.]

A menacing secret lazes around, sharklike, just beneath the comparatively placid surface of The Young Man From Atlanta, the sorrowful, satiric new play by Horton Foote that opened on Friday night at the Kampo Cultural Center. The secret is never mentioned by the characters whose lives it threatens to ruin. Having no name, it can't be spoken even on a dare. Instead, it's always referred to indirectly, and with a kind of puzzled Christian innocence that denies the secret's corrosive effects. Mr. Foote's characters say that everything's all right, but he knows better.

After Talking Pictures and Night Seasons, the Signature Theater Company continues its season devoted to the playwright with a first-rate production of a work that will haunt you long after the performance. The Young Man From Atlanta is both quintessential Horton Foote and, in terms of subtext, one of his least characteristic works.

The director is Peter Masterson, who was responsible for the film adaptation of Mr. Foote's Trip to Bountiful. The excellent cast is headed by Ralph Waite and, in a role very different from the big-hearted madam she played in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Carlin Glynn, who is married to the director. The Signature people know how to make a playwright feel at home.

The Young Man From Atlanta, which is to run through Feb. 26, forsakes Mr. Foote's usual rural Texas setting for the big city of Houston. The time is the spring of 1950, a few months before the outbreak of the Korean War, when American business was still adjusting to the jittery post-World War II economy. The principal characters are Will (Mr. Waite) and Lily Dale Kidder (Ms. Glynn), though a major presence is their only child, the 32-year-old Bill, who had been living in Atlanta until his recent death.

It seems that while on a business trip in Florida, Bill stopped for a swim, walked into a lake and drowned. Just like that. The curious thing is that he didn't know how to swim. His father acknowledges that it was a suicide, though for reasons he doesn't want to think about. Lily Dale is convinced that it was some kind of terrible accident.

As imagined by Mr. Foote and played with desperate heartiness by Mr. Waite, Will recalls the kind of middle-American boosters Sinclair Lewis wrote about in the 1920's. He's a Republican. He's self-made and proud of it. When first seen, he's reaping the rewards of a successful 40-year career with a wholesale grocery company. He has just built a $200,000 house, "the biggest and the best" that money can buy, in what he fondly calls the best city in the South. He has a slight heart condition, but his optimism is ironclad, even when he's reminded of Bill.

Bill's death has changed Lily Dale. She still plays the doll-wife to Will, whom she calls "Daddy." She dresses in clothes that look expensive but are not especially suitable. She keeps up appearances. Yet instead of devoting herself to her music as she once did, playing the piano and composing for family and friends, she has turned to religion.

At the start of the play, two things happen to wreck the accommodations that Will and Lily Dale have made to keep their marriage in balance: Will is fired from his job, which leaves him almost broke, and the title character turns up in Houston.

The Young Man From Atlanta refers to Randy Carter, Bill's roommate. He remains offstage, but is an even more vivid presence in the play than the lost Bill. Randy has come to Houston in hopes that Will will give him a job. He was there for the funeral, Will remembers, crying harder and more noisily than Lily Dale during the service.

Though forbidden by Will to have any dealings with the young man, Lily Dale has not only been talking to him several times a week on the telephone, but she has also been advancing him money. First she felt compelled to help out when, being so upset over Bill's death, he couldn't work. Then his mother needed an operation, and his sister's husband disappeared, leaving her with three children to support. Lily Dale has so far shelled out $35,000.

In the work of any other play-wright, a character like Lily Dale would seem naïve to the point of simple-mindedness. As conceived by Mr. Foote and played by Ms. Carlin, she's far from simple-minded. In her own gentle way, she's furious and steely. She's willing to pay for the comfort provided by the young man, who tells her what a religious fellow Bill was and how his praying used to cheer the boarding house where they lived.

This being 1950, nobody in the play mentions the word "gay," or refers even euphemistically to the truth of the relationship between Bill and Randy. From the few details that we get, it seems to have been a stormy affair, possibly a platonic one, involving the prematurely old, balding, severely repressed Bill consumed by a passion for a fast-talking hustler 10 years his junior.

In much the same manner that Will and Lily Dale come to terms with the loss of their son, Mr. Foote comes to terms with them and with Bill and Randy. That is, obliquely. The Young Man From Atlanta is not a gay play. Yet the playwright gives us a portrait of parents who, to any independent child, would seem to be monsters, and of a child whose feckless life is beyond the comprehension of his sternly Protestant parents.

The Young Man From Atlanta can also be blunt. The opening is as overstuffed with exposition as the first scene of one of Shakespeare's histories. The rest of the play is more graceful. Mr. Foote avoids big scenes here. He creates rich characters that allow for rich performances by Mr. Waite, Ms. Glynn and the members of the supporting cast, particularly James Pritchett, who plays Lily Dale's observant, non-committal stepfather, and Beatrice Winde, who's stunning in the tiny role of a former maid.

Also noteworthy is E. David Cosier's principal set: a clean, new, depressingly impersonal living room framed in a way to look like a shadow box. it's a perfect reflection of a genteel world where money and property, which are supposed to signify happiness, are seen to be merely pieces of overstuffed furniture

The Young Man From Atlanta doesn't soothe or lift any hearts. It's tough, one of Mr. Foote's most serious and scathing works. The Signature Theater's estimable season goes on.