John Guare is still at sea in "Gardenia."… It's hard to accept that the author of this emotionally blocked, almost willfully undramatic work is the man who wrote "The House of Blue Leaves," "Landscape of the Body" and the screenplay for "Atlantic City." Sad to say, it is all too easy to believe that "Gardenia" comes from the playwright who earlier this season unveiled "Lydie Breeze."

Mr. Guare's new play is about the same 19th-century characters as its immediate predecessor, and the two dramas are related in perhaps more ways than the author might wish. "Gardenia" is even weaker than "Lydie Breeze" but, distressingly enough, it manages to diminish the earlier play, such as it was, retroactively.

In "Lydie," we visited a Nantucket beach house full of characters whose lives had been wrecked years earlier—after a post-Civil War Utopian commune had failed and its galvanizing queen bee, Lydie, had committed suicide. While Mr. Guare didn't make us understand his characters' past or care about their present, he did at times tantalize us about them. Surely, we thought, they would spring to full dramatic life if we could only see what had happened in those traumatic years before the curtain went up.

We finally do travel back to that mysterious, inviting past in "Gardenia"—and, as it turns out, Mr. Guare calls his own bluff. Now that we at last meet Lydie, as well as the young incarnations of the three Civil War veterans who love her madly, it is only to find them back on the beach, whining about their transcendental commune's demise just as their counterparts in "Lydie Breeze" do. The complaining still takes the turgid form of omniscient prose and literary quotations that leave little room for characterization. The creaky Gothic melodrama that fitfully connects the monologues is unconvincing—and, to those who saw "Lydie Breeze," unsurprising.

Here, as before, the talk is about America's failure to live up to its democratic ideals and about the plundering of the land by Gilded Age entrepreneurs. This time the playwright has added another theme, about the birth of a realistic, distinctly American literature: His hero … aspires to write a novel that will sweep away "the dust of European libraries." Eventually he does—a no-holds-barred account of the commune that sounds like Nathaniel Hawthorne's Brook Farm novel, "The Blithedale Romance," as rewritten by Theodore Dreiser.

All of Mr. Guare's concerns, however familiar, are worthwhile. The trouble is that he hasn't dramatized them. Instead, his characters repeatedly recite his themes—as if no one in the audience had ever read William Dean Howells or Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau in the originals. When Mr. Guare tires of that, he cranks up his story, without integrating it into the announced substance of the play. Even so, most of the narrative occurs before the curtain rises, or during the nine-year gap that occurs at intermission, or in the interval that separates "Gardenia" and "Lydie Breeze."

What makes both plays seem so pretentious is Mr. Guare's insistence on regurgitating his literary sources without remaking them into art of his own. The sections of "Gardenia" that seem pure Guare are scant and don't add up. We never understand how … [the] sensitive hero of Act I could end up a jailed murderer in Act II—or how his best friend … could grow from a likable simp to a callow politician over the same timespan. The pivotal Lydie … is just an assertive Mother Earth in Act I, a blurry nutcase in Act II.

There is, happily, another, livelier major character—if only for half of Act I. He is the third Civil War veteran (and third side of a love triangle)…. His principal speech—an ironic account of a death struggle between two corrupt tycoons on a cross-country train—reminds us of how inventive and flavorful a dramatist Mr. Guare can be. Some of the other writing is surprisingly self-indulgent and sloppy, especially so in the portentous overuse of the trite titular metaphor (a gardenia plant is forever blooming or dying)….

Meanwhile the biggest question remains: Why is Mr. Guare, who is no fool, writing these plays? Presumably it's because he has his own burning views about our country's history and destiny, about the passions between men and women. And perhaps the feelings are so raw that he needs the esthetic distance he gains by retreating ceaselessly into the past.

But if that's fine in principle, the distance in this case proves far too vast. When a writer as talented as Mr. Guare creates plays as elaborately evasive and disembodied as "Gardenia" and "Lydie Breeze," one can only wonder if he's afraid to confront whatever it is he really wants to say.