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"At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman. Once she gets on top, it's over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated."

"New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities."

For the pharmaceutically fried denizens of the squalid Hollywood Hills house in which Mr. Rabe's 1984 drama takes place, drugs and alcohol are way beyond recreational status. They're what generate thought and action, love and hate, security and anxiety, often in such a blurred succession of responses that it's hard to distinguish among them.

Hedonists is not exactly the word for these folks, who cling to the margins of the film industry. Even high, they're low. But thanks to a terrific cast that parks its vanity in the wings - directed by Scott Elliott and led by Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton and Parker Posey - theatergoers are likely to experience a heady buzz of excitement and clarity that fades only in the last quarter of this three-hour production and that any of the desperate characters onstage would kill for.
. . .
These jerks are drawn, by performers and playwright, with such fine-grained artistry and accuracy that they are compulsively watchable, giving the lie to the theory that you have to like characters to be engaged by them. What the show brings out so well is the fractured consciousnesses of people whose moods are determined by their most recent forms of self-medication. Halfway through this production, it occurred to me that "Hurlyburly" may be the smartest, and certainly the least sentimental, play ever written about life on drugs.

The speech of these coke-snorting, dope-toking, tequilla-swilling characters is circular, repetitive and shot through with abrupt shifts in attitude. Yet - and this is a crucial yet - we are always aware of an aching emotional and intellectual restlessness, fed by a need for clarity, to use one of Eddie's favorite words, in a muddled, superficial environment.

The characters may be victims of the psychobabble, spiritual mantras and film jargon of the world they inhabit. But they are also perversely struggling to penetrate their self-induced haze. The production is propelled throughout by a sense of thwarted energy and a crippled quest for substance.

It is heartening to reflect that the best of Bill Murray may be yet to come. These days he is a wiser and a madder man; his ennui has lost any trace of a pose, and he sits around (for a tall guy, he can look oddly squat, verging on the shrunken) as if wearing an invisible T-shirt that says “I Told You So.”