Lost Souls

By Frank Rich

3 Cheever Stories, PBS, starting Oct. 24

Some day PBS's home-grown dramatic programs are going to be the equal of its British imports--but when? After watching public television's adaptation of three John Cheever stories, one is tempted to despair. Here, it seems, PBS had a sure shot. The scripts are by outstanding playwrights: Wendy Wasserstein (Uncommon Women and Others), A.R. Gurney Jr.

(Children) and Terrence McNally (Bad Habits). The directors are Jack Hofsiss (The Elephant Man), Jeff Bleckner (Sticks and Bones), and Film Maker James Ivory (The Europeans). The cast features several of America's strong actors. No matter.

The problems begin with the choice of material. Cheever's best stories are not merely chronicles of upper-middle-class life, but Kafkaesque tragedies about what happens when a rigorously ordered world starts to go mad. Instead of dramatizing tales from the two major Cheever story collections, The Enormous Radio and The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, PBS has selected trifles from The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. These are then stretched out to fill an hour each.

The consequence of the padding is the kind of literal dramaturgy that obliterated The Scarlet Letter last season. Unlike the British creators of The Glittering Prizes or I, Claudius, PBS gives its audience little credit for sophistication. In The Sorrows of Gin, the first and worst of the Cheevers, the warring suburban couple (Edward Herrmann and Sigourney Weaver) can hardly be seen for all the shots of gin bottles. Yet Gin is not about alcoholism; like Henry James' What Maisie Knew, it is about a child who unwittingly discovers the self-deceptions of the adults.

The other two shows also flatten Cheever's subtleties into middle-brow platitudes. In O Youth and Beauty!, Michael Murphy plays a onetime Princeton track star, now a bank executive, who vexes his wife (Kathryn Walker) by jumping over furniture at cocktail parties. Not content to let this conceit speak for it self, Playwright Gurney supplies dialogue to explain that the hero is "surmounting the obstacles of middle age . . . [by] leaping above the paraphernalia of middle-class life." In The Five-Forty-Eight, a dance of death between a married man (Laurence Luckinbill) and his jilted lover (Mary Beth Hurt), the story's psycho logical suspense is gutted by a string of clumsy nightmare and flashback sequences. Were it not for the fine, anguished performances of Murphy and Hurt, the final two shows would have no more meaning or passion than the first. Even so, they are not powerful enough.

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