On Broadway Home

at the Morosco Theater, 215 W. 45th St., through January 9.

IF YOU'RE a little boy and you've scraped your knee, home is where you go to get a kiss and a band-aid from your mother. And when you become a man, you're happy to come home at night to the wife and family, safe from the world, at least for a while. Yes, home is where the heart is. Although people often search for a home away from home, they rarely find one. For there's no place like home. Home, sweet home.

It's ironic that the word "home" has another meaning; a gray institution where we store the old, the sick, and the insane, waiting for them to die. We call some of these homes "asylums," and the people inside them "madmen." When occasionally, as in Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, we are forced to enter an asylum, we see lunatics prancing, laughing, and shrieking. Frightened, we can still leave reassured, thinking, "So that's what a madman is like. Well, no one I know is quite like that. Thank God."

David Storey's Home is an asylum, and his characters are madmen. But his home is far closer to ours, and its inhabitants hardly seem madder than the people around us. When Harry, played by John Gielgud, walks onto an almost bare stage, neatly folds his gloves and newspaper onto a table, and lowers himself into a frame chair, he could be anywhere. At a garden party, or perhaps a seaside resort. And Jack (Ralph Richardson), moving painfully to the table, smiling slightly, asking if he may sit down-is that what a lunatic looks like? Not until Jack asks Harry "How long have you been here?" and the second man, wounded, stammers, "Oh. . . a couple of. . .," do we begin to realize where they are. And what they are. For Jack and Harry are on the margins of life. Their lives are over; all they have left is time. As they talk, pulling up events from pasts that have detached from the present, looking off mistily at futures they know no longer exist, the two men expose the emptiness of their world.

No longer able to act, Harry and Jack observe and remember. They watch the people who walk by their table, discuss them, recall others like them. Although their recollections are often funny, Jack and Harry cannot laugh; they can only smile. And cry. Even their pasts seem alien, and time, all they have left, is an enemy. "You wonder how there was ever time for it all," Harry muses. "Time?" Jack replies. "Don't mention it." Each day is the same. They go to breakfast, and then to lunch, and then they take tea, and then they leave for dinner. In between, they watch the time. "One of the advantages of a late lunch is that it leaves a shorter space to tea," Jack remarks. Day after day, they sit, waiting to be buried.

But the day we see in the play is a bit different. Jack and Harry greet each other and talk. Not only that. They meet Kathleen and Mariorie, two lower-class women who are earthier and more honest than the genteel men. It is from the women that we learn that Harry burned down a building, and that Jack followed little girls. Spouting giggles at Harry's unintentional double-entendres and leaning coquettishly on his arm, Kathleen clearly likes the shy, wistful man; perhaps Marjorie, sour and blunt, finds Jack attractive as well. the relationship cannot develop. "Events have their own momentum," Harry says at one point. Without hope, and thus without aims, Jack and Harry are unable to communicate to others. They can only toss words back and forth, hardly listening to the other's answer, speaking of memories that have no relevance to their reality. They can only wait for dinner. When the lights dim, they are still on stage, alone and silent.

In such a simply written play, the actors become especially important. Gielgud and Richardson are extraordinary. Their meticulous performances, with countless shades and nuances of expression and speech-repeating the same words and sighs in slightly different, carefully thought-out ways-make the play beautiful to watch. In difficult roles without any real action, the two masters complement each other perfectly. Their dialogues have the counterpoint of music and the precision of ballet. Also in the original London production, Mona Washbourne as Kathleen and Dandy Nichols as Marjorie are funny and excellent, and Graham Weston, as Alfred, the lobotomized wrestler, is very capable in a supporting role. Lindsay Anderson's direction is outstanding.

Are Jack and Harry mad? The word has little meaning here. If we call them lunatics, they will only point to Alfred, who lifts and lowers furniture and speaks in monosyllables. If they are madmen, what is he? Lonely, sad, aimless, they are not so very different from us. Their world is an enlarged corner of our own. While most of us don't live in the home of Jack and Harry, ours is not the home of happy proverbs either. Which is why, though we may not be old men or madmen, we are nevertheless affected deeply by this play. The walls of our home aren't gray, but then, they aren't golden either.