In the opening shots of John Guare and Louis Malle's remarkable film "Atlantic City," we watch ghostly old beach hotels, the repositories of gilded, early 20th-century American dreams, collapse under the wreckers' ball. "Lydie Breeze," the Guare-Malle theatrical collaboration that opened at the American Place last night, is set in another crumbling beach town of another era—hurricane-gutted Nantucket in 1895—but it is about the same dreams, the same ghosts, the same kind of metaphorical wreckage.

"Lydie Breeze" is not, however, an achievement of the same high order of "Atlantic City." Like Mr. Guare's other recent plays—notably "Landscape of the Body" and "Bosoms and Neglect"—his new one is a literate, ambitious experiment in which luminous and savage theatrical bits float within a murky, incorporeal whole.

The word "literate" cuts both ways in describing this play. On one hand, Mr. Guare has written some characteristically transporting speeches that combine the absurdly comic with the poetic and the grotesque—an account of William Randolph Hearst inventing the Spanish-American War, a graphic description of a woman's hanging, a cataloguing of the mysterious contents of the sea. At the same time, "Lydie Breeze" seems to choke on literary references. In addition to its ample Ibsen allusions, this play explicitly or implicitly invokes American writers from the transcendentalists through James and Dreiser to Fitzgerald and O'Neill. It's weight that "Lydie Breeze" never quite earns or supports.

The play is set in a haunted, weather-beaten shell of a beach house, and its titular figure is long dead—a woman who committed suicide after her husband murdered her lover. The characters are Lydie's cursed familial and spiritual inheritors: her husband …, now pardoned for his crime; her two daughters …; an Irish maid …, and a mysterious visitor from England …, who proves to be both the long-lost son of Lydie's lover and, in one of Mr. Guare's cleverest conceits, the star of a hit West End production of "Frankenstein."

Most of Act I is devoted to dredging up the past that once brought these characters into tragic fusion. It's a past that not only involves murder, but also the battle of Gettysburg, a utopian Brook Farm-like commune, and, most important, a much passed-on case of syphilis that has afflicted at least four of the play's seen and unseen characters. In Act II, Mr. Guare's understandably addled people resolve that past in a series of jerky confrontations, farfetched revelations and suicides that finally trail off into a forced and unconvincing series of sentimental reconciliations.

The imagery that runs through this frantic family history—disease, insanity, mutilation, death, decay, poisoned sex—is not new in Mr. Guare's work, even though the period idiom is. As in "Atlantic City," he appears to use both that imagery and old-fashioned melodrama to dramatize America's spiritual decline—in this case the rude awakening of the post-Civil War years, during which an idealistic, isolated nation transformed itself into a modern industrial superpower. And, again as in "Atlantic City," the characters in "Lydie Breeze" fall into two camps: the greedy movers and shakers of the new order, and the stubborn romantics who cling to the old ideals even as the sand shifts under their feet. The younger believers, Mr. Guare seems to feel, may redeem us yet.

But this time the theme doesn't emerge from the characters and drama. The often obscure linkage between substance and action is baldly announced by the author instead. When we're not being portentously told about Hearst's offstage, history-shaking machinations (his yacht is moored nearby), we're hearing that "the curtain is about to go up on a new century," about the invention of electricity and malevolent high-speed industrial sewing machines, about how America follows "the itch of the pocket" instead of its democratic promise.

The dialogue that doesn't reach for historical resonance too often indulges in mock-Ibsen or O'Neill rhetoric that shrouds the characters: "There are so many ghosts here" or "We've all ceaselessly ruined each other's lives" or "How can you even begin to find the path to forgiveness?" Peel away these lines and what's often left is an overly plotty yet static potboiler—"Peyton Place" meets "Ragtime"—in which much of the action happens offstage in the past or the future. The author seems more intent on exhuming the complex and ultimately ludicrous genealogical path of that marauding case of syphilis than in giving his play or its people a dramatic present tense. (p. 344)