The very best moments in Hugh Leonard's play "Summer" are the very first. The lights come up on a grassy hill high above Dublin, and we find eight people relaxing after a picnic lunch, reclining in the sod, saying nothing. It's obvious that these people all belong to the same party, but, for this extended instant, each character is isolated, staring off into a lonely space of his own choosing. Yellow light hangs heavy in the air. Birds chirp in the distance. One of the figures slightly rearranges his posture. And while no one has spoken a line, the audience has already been treated to a poignant foreboding of the evening's subject. The tranquil hush of the hill, the beatific stares on the faces, the translucent glow of the sky all summon up an utter stillness that cannot be confused with anything but death.

"Summer" … has other things to recommend it besides that strangely upsetting first tableau. As one expects from this writer, his play boasts a bracing splash of Irish wit, a fierce sense of compassion and some highly theatrical roles…. But there's also an obviousness to the writing that prevents a decent, workmanlike evening from ever really taking off. We are haunted by the play's opening because it dramatizes Mr. Leonard's theme elliptically, poetically. In much of the rest of "Summer," the playwright merely states his concerns point-blank….

In the [play's] best scenes, the picnickers rise above their often archetypal behavior to surprise both the audience and themselves. This is especially true of [Myra White].

Mr. Leonard's other dramatic highpoints tend to be ordinary. Two of his men face death through the simple means of being struck by illness. The other man … carries on an illicit liaison with a pal's stereotypically bored, committeewoman wife…. This affair is announced in an awkward, one-shot stream-of-consciousness sequence and quickly inflates into a banal, overextended treatise on emptiness. The worst written characters, perhaps, are the children. In Act I, they exist mainly to scorn their parents' middle-aged despair; six years later, after some time at the school of hard knocks, they all too diagramatically succumb to the melancholy they once mocked.

The play's smaller conceits also seem overly portentous. The songs that turn up as incidental music—"When I'm 64," "Those Were the Days, My Friends," "Sentimental Journey"—all rub in the play's theme. At the end of Act I, a character surveys the picnic grounds and announces, "I like this place, it's unspoiled," and, sure enough, decay has set in six years later. At the beginning of Act II, we learn that the beautiful fields below the hill—Mr. Leonard's proverbial cherry orchard—have been destroyed for the sake of some tract houses. Not long after that, metaphorical darkness arrives, as well as some rain and a line about "vultures in the garden."