'Busy World': Oddly inert play

The lovely title of Keith Bunin's play,

The Busy World Is Hushed

, comes from this prayer by John Henry Newman:

May He support us all the day long,

till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes,

and the busy world is hushed,

and the fever of life is over and our work is done!

Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging,

and a holy rest, and peace at the last.

This is a play about religion, not homosexuality. That the two lovers are gay men is, I assume, the reason it turns up in the Gay & Lesbian Theatre Festival.

The Busy World is Hushed

is a talky and intellectual, full of metaphors and contrivances and literary devices, a kind of David Hare wannabe. It has no inherent action except the emotional intensity supplied by the actors and the director. In this case, that amount would be zero.

Hannah (April Woodall), a grim, lonely Episcopal minister and serious scholar of ancient Coptic texts, hires frazzled Brandt (Paul Mcelwee) as a ghostwriter. Brandt's uneasy spiritual life has been made more so by his father's terminal illness; there is much questioning of the nature and function of human suffering.

Enter Hannah's son Thomas (Peter Kidd), a young man whose life has been a series of departures - from his mother, from medical school, from a Buddhist monastery. His favorite game is "Get Lost." His father issue is that his father drowned - perhaps intentionally - before he was born. He unconvincingly combs through his father's Bibles for clues.

But, of course, the big father issue of the play is with the Father, although most of the religious debates seem to be composed of non sequiturs and thus are not really debates; the thread of the arguments is made even less intelligible by the actors' dropping their voices so you can't hear the ends of sentences. Director Michael Osinski has kept them far upstage, often turned away from the audience, making them even harder to understand.

Woven through the spiritual conversations are the relationship conversations: mother and son, priest and pupil, lover and lover. And it's hard not to feel that any mother who ends a crucial argument with her troubled 26-year-old son by saying, "I think it's past your bedtime" - and saying it without any self-mockery - is somebody who deserves what she gets. And it's hard not to feel "who cares?" when Thomas runs away again.

There is very little "busy world" in this play; it seems hermetically sealed in the library that is its setting.

Airless and inert,

The Busy World Is Hushed

never seems inhabited - either by people we can care about or questions that engage us.

Gay & Lesbian Theatre Festival (Arden Theatre,

40 N. Second St.).

Through Friday. Tickets: $17.50.

Information: 215-922-1122.