The American theater is blessed. John Robin Baitz is only 30 years old and has three hit plays under his belt.
There's no telling how many more Baitz will contribute in what is shaping up as a prolific and talented lifetime, judging from his work as author of "The Substance of Fire" and "The Film Society."His newest contribution to the contemporary stage, "The End of the Day," is a sly, sophisticated, clever and satiric commentary about the excesses of shallow lives that revolve around money.
It is brilliant in its conception and execution in its current premiere production by off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons, starring Roger Rees, who won a Tony Award some years back to the title role in "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby."
Far more subtle and complex than "The Substance of Fire," also current at the Orpheum Theater, "The End of the Day" tells a wicked tale and tells it hilariously. Director Mark Lamos gives it the no-hold-barred production it deserves.
Standing in front of a three-way mirror that reflects his image to the audience, Graydon Massey, a young English psychiatrist, played to perfection by Rees, practices the Pledge of Allegiance.
He has just become an American citizen, thanks to his marriage to a Jewish-American princess of a Los Angeles produce dynasty, and he is wallowing in the vulgarities of his new country.
Five years later, we meet him again. Having chucked his Beverly Hills practice, his blond wife and her excessive family, he is trying to do penance by working as an oncologist (tumor specialist) in a county hospital in the L.A. barrio.
But Massey, the former cad scion of a wealthy British family, cannot get off so easily.
Not only does his father-in-law threaten to kill him if he doesn't repay the cost of his medical training, his former wife also threatens bodily harm if he does not return to her or at least give her a priceless painting that his family owns.
What's more, his patients and colleagues insult him and malign his motives for working in a hospital where nothing works and patients are dying in the halls. And his old medical school buddy pressures him to sell out in a cocaine deal.
Being who he is, Massey cannot escape his socio-economic milieu and so goes on to even greater success.
This is a play utterly without good guys, but the bad guys and so relentlessly bad and totally charming that they are irresistible.
What makes them even more compelling is that 10 of the characters are played by five actors, each getting the juicy chance to play complete opposites.
Veteran leading lady Nancy Marchand, for instance, is both the cynical old battle-ax of a hospital administrator and Graydon's self-centered witch of a mother.
Paul Sparer, Marchand's husband in private life, is both the crude L.A. produce purveyor and Graydon's wily uncle and his mother's lover.
Philip Kerr is both Graydon's corrupted medical school pal and a pathetic old English butler who has been waiting seven years for his wages.
John Benjamin Hickes is both a depressed patient with little reason to live and Graydon as a boy.
In the richest role of all, Jean Smart is both Graydon's bimbo ex-wife, Helen, and his stuffy upper-crust new wife, Lady Hammersmith Urbaine Supton Stoat.
Only Roger Rees is his own character all the way through and then even he plays his own father for one scene.
At the risk of hyperbole, the casting, directing and acting are just about perfect. As are John Arnone's sets for Graydon's crumbling office in the dysfunctional hospital and his mother's formerly stately mansion in Belgravia, now done up in psychedelic modern.
As for the generation who said, "Don't trust anyone over 30," Jon Robin Baitz, having reached the Waterloo age, will probably go on writing fresh, insightful, wry comments on society for decades. Let's hope so.