"I was a man who ached for a utopia," says Joshua Hickman in John Guare's new play, "Lydie Breeze." Everyone in Guare's lyrical, elegiac, melodramatic, funny, sorrowing and celebratory play has ached for a utopia of one sort or another: the primal utopia of parental connection, the sentimental utopia of romantic love, the civic utopia of sharing and brotherhood. "Lydie Breeze" is about these aches, which are never to be assuaged, and about these utopias, which are never to be attained. The biggest ache of all belongs not to any of the characters but to America itself, which is in a way the protagonist in this play that reflects the boom-and-bust cycle of American dreams.

The gothic strain has always been a key element in John Guare's sensibility, and here that strain is reinforced by his creation of a web of corrupted relationships personifying the interlocking, interbreeding corruptions that have poisoned the American dreams, leaving these people to wander in and out of each other's nightmares. In a crescendo of confrontations, Guare's characters come to terms with the haunted past—terms that vary from self-destruction to self-acceptance to the renewal of hope in an ambiguous future. "It's almost 1900," exults Gussie. "It's about to be my century."

Guare, like E. L. Doctorow in "Ragtime" and other writers, has seized on the turn of the century as the pivotal moral moment in American history. He's taken the Ibsen-like themes of tainted blood and skeleton-stuffed closets and turned them into a Yankee Doodle Deadly saga of broken promises. Because he's John Guare, he has also had a lot of fun doing this. The glory of Guare is his unabashed (or perhaps abashed) romanticism, his bifocal vision of the tragic and the absurd, his natural instinct for the theatrical. It may be that the true contemporary form of tragedy is one that triggers a laugh as its proper response—a new kind of laugh, a slapstick sob at the Strangelovian nature of our fate.

Guare is the master of such shenanigans. In a big scene between Joshua and Jeremiah, their recriminations explode into a pastiche of Victorian stage melodrama that adds a crazy poignance to their mutual pain. A key detail in Joshua's account of the murder of his friend is a bottle of Moxie, the legendary pre-Coke soft drink that created a uniquely American word for courage and defiance. The Moxie touch creates an unsettling dissonance, like a Sophoclean soliloquy flipping into Abbott and Costello….

Guare doesn't have perfect control of this mixed style. He can plop into the sententious, as when Josh says: "America could have been great, but we never trusted our dreams. We only trust the itch in the pocket." And Gussie, who prefigures the political groupies, the "boiler-room girls" of contemporary Washington, says: "The only power is the power that comes from being around power." Such sousaphone splats could so easily have been turned into true Guarisms that they irritate.

Nevertheless, "Lydie Breeze" is Guare's most ambitious and finely tuned work, filled with the special sweetness and courage of a sensibility that feels deeply and that exultantly takes on the job of expressing the wounding contradictions of our time.