The Young Man from Atlanta.

He was 37, unmarried, unathletic, and very close to his mother. He roomed with a younger man, to whom he gave his sizable nest egg for the purchase of "nice things." As a child he was considered "pretty." Enough to trigger your gaydar? Perhaps, but the ambiguity of this man's life is the mystery at the center of Horton Foote's 1995 Pulitzer prize-winning play The Young Man From Atlanta, newly arrived on Broadway.

Rip Tom and Shirley Knight, veterans of Broadway, film, and TV, portray Will and Lily Dale Kidder, a Houston couple in 1950. The play picks up six months after the couple's only child, Bill, has mysteriously drowned. Bill's roommate, Randy, has come from Atlanta to meet with Bill's parents, whom he hasn't seen since Bill's funeral; or maybe to wrangle more money out of Lily Dale, who--unbeknownst to her husband--has already "loaned" him $35,000 (in 1950!) to cover various misfortunes that have supposedly befallen him since Bill's death.

Will refuses to see Randy, so Randy remains offstage, first telephoning the Kidders from his room at the Houston YMCA, then showing up on their front doorstep--out of the audience's sight--only to be turned away at Will's behest by a reluctant Lily Dale.

Though the press surrounding Young Man has played down its homosexual implications, they seem the only logical explanation for Bill's relationship with Randy and for his father's efforts to deny it. Will says to Lily Dale, "There was a Bill I knew and a Bill you knew, and that's the only Bill I care to know about." Lily Dale loves Randy, especially for the details he shares with her about her son--details Will dismisses. "That boy is a liar," he says. "He may be," answers Lily Dale in one of Young Man I s most moving moments, "but it comforted me to hear him say it, and I needed comforting."

At 81, Foote's artistic heart remains in good shape, his instinct for truth intact. Young Man addresses the futile pursuit of the American dream a la Death of a Salesman while adding heterosexuality as a component of that dream.

The tapestry of themes sometimes frays, but luckily, Knight holds the play together. She is every inch the Southern lady, sitting with hands crossed demurely and legs crossed at the ankle. Sometimes she borders on a Texan Edith Bunker, dizzy and devoted to her husband, which makes her moments of stillness and solitude all the more gut-wrenching. Gay or straight, Bill was her son, and Lily Dale is a mother in mourning; when Knight sits alone onstage, softly singing "Billy Boy"--a folk song she sang to her young son--waves of grief wash over her and the audience, breaking our hearts and rocking Lily Dale back and forth like a shipwreck survivor in a lifeboat on a rough ocean.