`IIAD' MAKES NOTHING PERFECTLY CLEAR.

Byline: Evan Henerson Theater Critic

Considering how many times he has his protagonist Richard Nixon express a desire to return home, it's a wonder playwright Donald Freed didn't title his new play ``American Odyssey.''

No. In ``American Iliad,'' the gas-filled world premiere at Burbank's Victory Theater, Nixon might be fighting a private war, but it's the audience who will emerge battle-scarred after sitting through this talky, overblown bit of semipolitical rhetoric. Here's another title suggestion: ``Victory Boulevard Pretension.''

A fantastical time-traveling journey through history, ``American Iliad'' sees a dying Nixon, apparently in the custody of a New Jersey retirement home, taking a mind trip between a Jersey beach in the year 2000 and a rally at the social think tank in Chautauqua exactly 100 years earlier. He also makes stops at an island presided over by a hale and hearty JFK living it up Gatsby-style with nurses who breast-feed him. What the heck? It's Tricky's fantasy.

Nixon is on a quest for ... what? Absolution? Truth? An answer to the question ``what went wrong?''? Maybe simply an ending to his last book, which will carry the title, yep, ``Going Home.'' Along the way, he meets Horatio Alger and Marilyn Monroe, and watches J. Edgar Hoover and his ``assistant,'' Clyde Tolson, waltz to ``Tea for Two'' in a blissful kind of domesticity.

Less an actual story than a vehicle for Freed's shambling rhetoric, ``Iliad'' really has nowhere to go without pirating someone else's metaphors. Staged by Maria Gobetti with minimal invention and some highly irritating technical flourishes. (strobe lights aren't that cool), the production might have had something of substance to impart if Freed did. Instead, it's two and a half hours of blather.

Veteran character actor Al Rossi gives Nixon a bit of Rodney Dangerfield's bugged-out strangeness. The racism, paranoia and growling egotism are all there, but this isn't a character to attract much interest. David Clennon (of ``thirtysomething'' and ``Once and Again'') is a laid-back Jack Kennedy, with a Bah-ston accent drifting in and out at will. He's having a ball.

At least somebody is.

``AMERICAN ILIAD''

Where: Victory Theatre, 3226 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank.

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 6:30 p.m. Sunday; through July 15.

Tickets: $22 to $24. Call [phone].

Our rating: One star

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Photo:

A ``retired'' JFK (David Clennon, left) offers support to a disoriented Richard Nixon (Al Rossi) in the fantasy ``American Iliad'' at the Victory Theatre.