The Dazzle.

* Written by Richard Greenberg * Directed by David Warren * Starring Peter Frechette, Reg Rogers, and Francie Swift * Roundabout Theatre Company at the Gramercy Theatre, New York City (through May 26)

A program note for Richard Greenberg's new play, The Dazzle, asserts that it is "based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, about whom I know almost nothing." Most people know almost nothing about the Collyer brothers, Langley and Homer, except that these eccentric siblings spent their twilight years living in a house stacked floor to ceiling with old newspapers and collected junk. Greenberg's imagined version of their story looks curiously similar to Strindberg's Dance of Death, which the playwright adapted for the production that appeared on Broadway last fall with Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren. Both plays depict a lifelong love-hate relationship between two individuals whose isolation is penetrated by a romantically threatening third party. Greenberg seems to present the brothers as incestuous lovers pried apart by a slumming socialite who wants to marry first one, then the other. Since the play's never explicit about their gayness, we can only view it as a portrait of early-20th-century repression. The play is a tame affair, but Reg Rogers is entertaining if mannered as crazy Langley, and Peter Frechette as Homer gives a subtle, radiant performance under the direction of David Warren.