EDGE New York City

Anyone who’s lived a little knows it’s probably best not to trust an Adonis-like man who appears almost magically from the water; wet, ripped, and wearing nothing but a red bathing suit.

And anyone who’s seen a little theater knows it’s probably best not to trust anyone in a play called The American Plan, Richard Greenberg’s daunting revival at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

After the trespassing sea creature, a.k.a., Nick Lockridge (Kieran Campion), meets the Catskills resident Lili Adler (Lily Rabe), she tells him he looks as if nothing’s ever happened to him. Lili, a young adult with a childlike manner, looks like the girl who everything’s happened to, and far too soon. The attraction is magnetic, two sides pulled together, and, despite life’s cruel fate, which hovers over these people like Jonathan Fensom’s cold-summer-trees set, everything wonderful cannot possibly not happen.

Such are the twisted ambitions of Greenberg’s austere comedy/drama, a mostly 1960s look at American ambition with a mostly new-millennium cynical eye. "The American Plan" doesn’t deliver knock ’em dead punch lines or go-for-the-jugular sentiment. Rather, it finesses you with humor and pathos while laying out a series of disturbing circumstances. Lili’s mother, Eva (Mercedes Ruehl), is a German Jew who protects her troubled child the way a lioness protects the lambs. A widow with a tragic past--everyone in this story has a tragic past--she brings along her only child to the Catskills, as well as her faithful maid, Olivia Shaw (Brenda Pressley), who dutifully acts her way through the role of "sane person on stage."

Soon after Lili and Nick are officially a couple, and once each reveals, or is exposed of, secrets and lies, Gil Harbison (Austin Lysy) also trespasses onto the dock, fully dressed, yet looking almost mystically like Nick. As soon as you realize an understudy didn’t jump in and take over the male lead, you know things are about to get really complicated.

It’s a good thing Greenberg’s play is solid and well-executed, as Director David Grindley makes no bones about announcing its importance. Virtually each scene starts and ends with a pause, a theatrical flourish rarely seen in plays of late. Long intervals tell us we should think about what just occurred. The playwright, too, fills each act with hefty monologues, the kind that aren’t interrupted with broken speech patterns and unfinished sentences via the world of David Mamet and untold imitators. If you find yourself taking mental cocktail-chatter notes, you’re in the right space. If you find yourself checking out, you’re in the wrong world.

As Lili, Rabe has one of the most difficult acting tasks in ages. Hers is one of those baffling characters who are neither completely stilted, nor properly grown-up. These people tend to only exist in theatrical worlds, and Rabe, while quite accomplished, tends to illustrate Lili as opposed to engulfing her, with Lili seeming more of a drawing than an actualized human being. Ruehl is understated excellence as the mother, so believably ensconced in her shell that you never quite know what’s manipulation and what comes from the heart.

Campion, who’s also required to be mysterious, distrustful, and charming (sometimes all in the same scene), plays it nicely straight throughout, so that the audience is required to make up their own minds. Lysy has a less-interesting role, but he brings needed charm to his determined go-getter, Gatsby.

To be sure, "The Great Gatsby" themes run through this play like the water that’s always distrustfully yonder; a younger America, with young people determined to invent their lives anew. Like the country itself, the characters from "An American Plan" are struggling to shape themselves and make good on promises, despite birthmarks that no surgeon can adequately remove.

While Grindley’s vision is strong and determined, what makes this play most arresting is, ironically, imagining different directors and actors pulling apart the puzzle and re-inventing the pieces. It’s the kind of jigsaw that yearns to be re-assembled.

At Manhattan Theatre Club’s Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th Street. For ticket information, call Telecharge at 212-239-6200, or visit www.ManhattanTheatreClub.com.