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ART LOOKS INWARD on itself and finds art, looking in on itself, and back; the artist portrays the artist portraying himself, and lands somewhere in between. Asymptotic maunderings, these, on the ineffable relation between art and the artist that animates Mark Leib's brilliant and vertiginously profound Terry by Terry, a new play which joined the American Repertory's repertoire last Friday at the Loeb. Terry is obsessively theatrical--it concerns a playwright and the play he has written, and its most visceral impact is on other writers. But to characterize such concerns as esoteric, to cubbyhole theater as some sort of elite hobby or idle plaything, is to miss the point: art is life, and Terry by Terry confronts the possible extinction of both.

Terry by Terry consists of two one-act plays: Terry Won't Talk and Terry Rex. Word of mouth has already decreed that Terry Won't Talk is the superior play; I would disagree, and add that Terry Rex, the second play in performance, is the heart of Leib's drama, and the first an essential gloss on it. Terry Rex presents Terry (Robertson Dean), the young author of Terry Won't Talk, (which is being performed "downtown"). Terry is tortured by his inability to write, a block he tries to dissolve through both hallucinations induced by lack of sleep and random acts of verbal cruelty toward his girlfriend Kathy (Lisa Sloan) and his friends from college days, Adrienne (Marianne Owen) and Wheeler (Kenneth Ryan). There is no indication by the end of the play that his problem is solved; to the contrary, it seems that Terry will never write successfully again.

Hyperintellectuality is the taproot of his paralysis, an acute self-consciousness and an encyclopedic, even frightening, knowledge of what has already been done in the theater and what little there is that remains to be done. Leib masterfully limns what W.J. Bate has pithily called "the burden of the past" with a virtuoso monologue in which Terry splices memorized quotations from a drama anthology while Wheeler, a translator, punctuates with footnotes. Terry declaims wildly and Wheeler answers, "Hedda Gabler--I think the Reinert translation," launching Terry into another recitation, from another play, which logically follows in the train of conversation. Terry knows his predecessors in Parnassus, knows them too well, in fact, ever to join them.

This theme finds its most complete expression in the concluding dialogue, as Terry wonders whether Kathy, his dartboard and punching-bag, will throw him out:

Terry: Oh, I'd say your position at the moment is sufficiently equivocal where you could get away with either. The abuse you're putting up with is certainly severe enough to produce a sort of Doll's House in reverse--"Terry--you're leaving." On the other hand, there's obviously been some compelling reason for your holding on to me even this long--so if you did a Streetcar and kept me, I don't think you'd be sinning against conventional psychology.

Kathy: I don't like either one.

Terry: I don't blame you. Both have already been done, and everything in between. It's not your fault.

Terry is demonically possessed by an internal critic, bears not a monkey but John Simon on his back, constantly rasping, "Trite, trite, done already." His phobia for the commonplace, his obsession with originality, keep him not only from writing but even from talking or living without wondering whether it's all been seen on some stage before. His friends have to be Holvard Solness and Miss Julies and when they can't, when he sees them as "cardboard characters" and "cartoons," and their "soap talk" as unsuitable dialogue, he abandons them, forgetting that the stuff of everyday life must be, by definition, commonplace. Terry wants to live as the artist of the new and the hero of the new, and when he can'the hardly wants to live at all. As the curtain falls Terry is very close to dead.

The internality of action in Terry Rex (much is thought, little happens) presents a dramatic dilemma for Leib, what might be called the problem of the inactive character. Talk, even when it is not "soap talk," is still talk, and begins, after a while, to beg for action. But Leib prefaces Terry Rex with the performance of Terry Won't Talk. This play, after all, is the product of Terry's mind, and serves to mirror that mind, highlighting in dumbshow the roiling preoccupations which, although related to Terry's burden of the past, more directly prevent him from writing.

Terry Won't Talk springs from the refusal of Terry Blade (Mark Linn-Baker) to communicate with his family; as sister Suzy (Marilyn Caskey) announces at the outset, "Momma! Terry won't talk!" Terry becomes a sort of walking Rorschach blot, upon whom each of the characters projects an explanation for his silence: his mother (Elizabeth Norment) thinks someone lied to him; his teacher (Nancy Mayans) thinks he's ill; the principal (John Bottoms) sees it as the silence of a poet; and Mrs. Blade's lover, Chester, who seems to be a regular reader of Existential Digest, ascribes it to despair:

You're a bright little guy, you catch things other people miss altogether. You look out of those eyes, and what do you see? A sick world... A chaotic world, spastic, anarchic, deity-deficient. People tell you you've got a future, but the only future you can count on starts six feet under.

Terry's silence leads to his being sent home from school and, ultimately, institutionalized.

The universe portrayed in Terry Won't Talk follows the absurdist archetype--it's only "new and fascinating," as Wheeler says in Terry Rex, "in the sense that a man who's been shipwrecked on a desert island for two hundred years might find a telephone new and fascinating." It includes the disutility of language: language is only dinner-table "chatter," and all attempts to get Terry to verbalize his meaning fail (Linn-Baker goes through the play without a word). There is the failure even of rational thought, as epitomized in the trivializing portrait of Chester. We get the dehumanizing effects of technology in an ingenious scene in which Terry's classmates, forming pistons with their fists, erase a girl's face.

Foremost, Terry Won't Talk embraces a thoroughgoing relativism, a denial of all values, an exposition of Wittgenstein's dictum (included in the program notes) that "all propositions are of equal value." As Mr. Blade tells Chester, "There's always an alternative," a meaningless choice between meaningless poles. People talk in paralleled non sequiturs:

Mrs. Blade: Had a nice day?

Mr. Blade: Oh, good and bad, good and bad. Stock market's up, Thank God, but commodities are down, damn it. Unfortunately, my secretary committed suicide, but luckily the boss gave me a promotion.

And in the school, the children give alternate reports on the bad and the good in history; Terry, of course, refuses to choose between them.

These ideas are not meant to be taken altogether seriously; Leib's artistry in creating a fine one-act play, and the softpedalled wryness of the pretentious program notes (including quotes from Kafka, Steiner, and Beckett, as well as Wittgenstein) only enhance the subtlety of what amounts to an elaborate parody of an absurdist drama. This is not to say that Leib does not believe in an absurdist view of the universe--he clearly does. He just doesn't believe in writing a play about it. His focus is not on the ideas themselves, which are, as Terry should be the first to see, now "commonplace," but rather on the effects of this Weltanschaung on the psychology of the artist.

The playwright Terry is Leib's modern man, a Hamletized intellectual crippled not so much by the burden of the past as by his own lack of conviction and values, unable, in the face of the failure of language and thought, even to speak, much less create a play; powerless, without a belief in absolutes, to believe in the absolute of his art; left, when the only true meaning is in silence, only to groan. Leib has, in a way, belied his vision by actually writing an eminently successful modern play (this should be called Terry by Terry by Terry), but it is no less disturbing as a result.

TERRY IS BY NO MEANS easy to stage, and the Rep's production goes far to surmount the difficulties of this complex and nuance-ridden play. Director John Madden seems, at times, apprehensive of his audience, unsure of how far to push, particularly in Terry Rex. He is on firmer turf in Terry Won't Talk, where the players' stylized panache smoothly implies a production of a production--actors playing actors. Madden's effect is boosted here by the equally stylized sets, always smaller than the stage, parading their artificiality, masterfully created by Andrew Jackness. The Terry of Terry Won't Talk is more metaphsyical than physical, but master mime Mark Linn-Baker brings him to life, sometimes with a tilt of his head, sometimes with a peculiarly appropriate shuffle of a walk. Richard Grustin is just as effective as Terry's father, turning in a suitably theatrical and vivacious performance.

But the star of Terry by Terry, if such an invidious term might be allowed, is Robertson Dean, the Terry of Terry Rex. Whining, puling, sparkling with intelligence and wit, posturing like a talented playwright who was once a very bad high school actor, Dean provokes the paradoxical mixture of sympathy and loathing the role calls for--he is us, but we don't have to like him for it. Lisa Sloan is marvelously attractive and genuine as Kathy Marianne Owen, a consummate actress when intact, is literally hobbled by a huge cast on her leg that forces her to lumber around the stage, punctuating her speech with thrusts of an orthopedic cane, in a way Adrienne, without a broken foot, never would

The only blot on the premiere is Kenneth Ryan, who lacks a sense of comic timing as Wheeler, stepping on some of Leib's best laugh lines. Which is a shame, because Terry is a very funny play, and depends on its humor to reach those for whom absurdism is not an assumption. (I am thinking particularly of the middle-aged audience that grew up with, not after Camus.)

Some have carped about Terry's length and "undergraduate" concerns, as if a play that consistently demands attention could ever be too long; as if some of the most fundamental questions for art in our times, even if they are more immediate to undergraduates, could ever be monopolized by them. It's that kind of obtuse criticism that can keep a Mark Leib from ever earning a living in America, that kind of blockish stupidity that makes Broadway an artistic Petra. Terry was an extraordinarily risky play for the Rep to choose, an unknown work by an unknown playwright which, as they probably knew, merited the risk. A play like Terry by Terry completes the Janus-head that symbolizes the company, realizes the best potential of the American Repertory Theater and the frankly visionary intentions of its artistic director.