There's an old Monty Python routine about how a man blithely leaves his flat one morning when-NOTHING HAPPENS! That pretty much summarizes the problem with these plays. Neither "The Dazzle", about a pair of bachelor brothers who bury themselves under trash in their Harlem mansion during the early years of the 20th Century, nor "Sunday in the Park with George", about a painter who buries himself in his work in a Paris park during the early years of the 20th Century, has any momentum whatsoever.

More generally, both plays suffer from the triumph of concept over content. Knowing only the barest-bones history of New York's real-life Collyer brothers, Richard Greenberg conjures two different versions of the sort of person who might live in a houseful of scavenged personal effects and decade-old newspapers. Langley (Tracy Letts) is a musician whose sense of time is so distorted that, as brother Homer (David Pasquesi) complains, "He takes forty-five minutes to play the minute waltz." Homer's own version of obsessive-compulsive disorder involves random lies and reverses, including a completely unmotivated swing from rejecting to embracing the plans of an heiress (Susan Bennett) to marry Langley. Despite studiously unpredictable performances from all three actors (evoking the distasteful aspects of insanity with such perfect pitch that I wanted to run screaming from the theater), the characters never engage us. We don't know what they want or how it might be connected to what they do. This may be an accurate account of certain types of mental illness (though not many) but is utterly unsatisfying as narrative, proving once for all that "what a great story!" is not a substitute for drama. Director David Cromer's leaden pacing may well be the most appropriate choice given Greenberg's apparent hostility to the very concept of character development. Confronted with the challenge of showing how two eccentric men in evening wear turned into bag people behind barricades, the playwright gives us an intermission and a lapse of 10 years between acts.

James Lapine thinks bigger: the acts in Sunday…are separated by 70 years. But the problem is the same, namely, that stasis can't be communicated effectively in a static work. In other words, "what a great picture!" isn't enough to sustain a drama, either. Georges Seurat spends Act I painting Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte and ignoring his mistress until she leaves him; Seurat's great-grandson spends Act II suffering from the commercial aspects of being an artist and ignoring his grandmother until she dies. And, notwithstanding the Pulitzer Prize and Stephen Sondheim's sacred cow status, the show's account of the difficulties of creation-how nobody understands and how art has to come before human relationships-verges on the sophomoric. No doubt brilliant performances went a long way to conceal this on Broadway; but this production boasts a mistress/grandmother (Sara Walsh) whose voice isn't up to the challenge and who has no chemistry with any of the men onstage, as well as a George (Joel Sutliffe) who performs capably without ever being able to demonstrate why we should give a damn about either of the self-involved man-children he impersonates. Director Gareth Hendee makes sure that the stage pictures appear on schedule but likewise neglects the central task of making the people matter, while music director Jon Steinhagen gets as much out of the score as possible given that the orchestra is muffled by being hidden under the stage and the singers are unamplified in a dead auditorium.