Theatre in Review: The Oldest Boy (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater)

	Cecila Keenan-Bolger, James Yaegashi. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

In The Oldest Boy, Celia Keenan-Bolger plays a nice, ordinary woman who answers the doorbell and finds a pair of Buddhist monks on her doorstep. As it happens, they believe that her three-year-old son is the reincarnation of a beloved lama; they hope to test their thesis, and, if satisfied that it is true, they want to spirit the youngster away to India, where he will occupy a place of honor and train to be a monk. Of course, they want parental consent. The fact that she doesn't immediately call the police is one of the most remarkable things about Sarah Ruhl's new drama.

In truth, Ruhl makes an effort to explain Keenan-Bolger's surprisingly complaisant, if anxious, response to this situation. (In the name of clarity, we will refer to the characters in The Oldest Boy by the actors' names; this is because the author has given them only generic titles, such as mother, father, monk, and lama.) For one thing, she is married, idyllically, to James Yaegashi, a Buddhist restaurateur, and, as she describes it, their meeting was surely fated. (Among other things, Yaegashi had to extricate himself from an arranged engagement with a woman from India, a decision that irked his family no end. Then again, one look at Yaegashi and Keenan-Bolger dropped her fiancé without a second thought.) If their love was written in the stars, might not the same be true of their offspring's fate? For another, Keenan-Bolger, a more-or-less lapsed Catholic, has, since marrying, flirted with Buddhism, although without "seeking refuge" or fully embracing the religion. She is at spiritual loose ends, having abandoned her English literature dissertation -- an oddly self-defeating study of religious devotion in atheist American authors -- following the death of her much-missed advisor. In this state, she feels the pull of the monks' certainty.

And so she admits the monks, played with considerable charm by James Saito and Jon Norman Schneider, and they subject the boy to a test, showing him a collection of personal items. The boy easily identifies those that belonged to the departed lama, thereby confirming -- at least in the minds of the monks -- the truth of his identity. Now difficult questions must be answered: Will Keenan-Bolger and her husband surrender their son? If so, when? Will they accompany him to India? Will they stay there, not to raise him, but to visit him on weekends? What is it like to see your three-year-old placed on a throne and made an object of veneration?

You would think that such questions point to upsetting -- make that traumatizing -- answers, of the sort that could potentially scar the child and his parents forever. Yet, when Keenan-Bolger announces, "I think I might break in half," you don't quite believe it. For one thing, The Oldest Boy never really stops to consider that the monks are mistaken or that reincarnation is not a fact of life; nonbelievers must take this situation at face value or not at all. For another, Keenan-Bolger faces this wrenching choice in a manner more befitting a sullen adolescent than an adult woman considering the unthinkable. "Why does every religion involve giving up children?" she snaps at one point, a line that would be funnier if it were truer.

To further scrub this situation clean of any disturbing or unruly emotions, the child is portrayed not by an actor but a Bunraku puppet voiced by the actor Ernest Abuba. The effect is most artfully achieved, but it reduces the character to the idea of a boy, rather than the real thing, and it serves to make Keenan-Bolger's reluctance seem all the more unreasonable. For that matter, she begins to bend toward the monks' point of view when they describe how much they miss their late teacher, which she compares to her sadness over the death of her academic advisor. But is this really a good reason to hand over your only child to strangers living on another continent? Apparently, yes: The Oldest Boy unfolds in a highly determined universe to which the characters have little choice but to submit; it's putting it mildly to say that this is not a conducive environment for drama.

Keenan-Bolger -- her arms folded in an unconsciously defensive posture, her brows furrowing as she tries to understand how a simple house call could upend her life -- is always a warmly ingratiating presence and she does her best to give her dilemma a flesh-and-blood reality. Given a telling line ("The crude animal fact of motherhood is bigger than an idea."), she makes the most of it. She is especially amusing when describing the disdain with which the heavily Marxist and deconstructionist academic committee greeted her dissertation. And when she finds herself in India, pregnant again, and going into labor miles from a hospital, her panic is both real and very funny. Yaegashi is a tactful, watchful presence as her husband, who has already challenged his religious tradition enough and yet doesn't want to break his wife's heart. Saito is strong as the more senior of the two monks, who knows what he is asking is unthinkable but asks it, anyway; however, his character fades notably during the second act.

Rebecca Taichman's production has some striking moments, especially when the boy is enthroned and the puppet is replaced by the middle-aged Abuba, a sign of the profound transformation that has occurred. The design is also simple, yet stunning. Mimi Lien's set features a beautiful polished-wood deck backed by a wall with a window that can expand to Cinemascope proportions, revealing Japhy Weideman's gorgeous color washes and miniature scenic horizons, complete with reflections in the water. Anita Yavich's costumes contrast contemporary casual wear with the monks' robes and elaborate, brightly colored Buddhist ceremonial garb. Darron L. West's sound design provides a number of scene-setting cues with some lovely traditional music.

And yet the production's many picturesque qualities do not necessarily work in its favor, as they are part of a grand design that offers a kind of picture-book Buddhism, which consists of such gorgeous colors and beautiful thoughts that only a fool would resist. Ruhl obviously feels deeply about the religion, and the script includes many references to the sufferings of Tibetan Buddhists at the hands of the Chinese government. (Unsurprisingly, there is no discussion of Buddhist violence in countries like Myanmar and Sri Lanka.) It's an attractive, but oddly pallid, portrait, and in the end it ducks the hardest question of all: What would induce you to give up your child?--David Barbour