AS THE applause for the Trinity Square Repertory Company's superb production of Israel Horowitz's Alfred the Great dies down and the audience begins to file out of the theater while the house lights come up, one feels slightly cheated--as if after savoring a fine appetizer the waiter has come to say that the main course will be indefinitely delayed. The appetite has been whetted and the palate prepared for a meal that never comes.

Alfred the Great is the first part of a trilogy by Horowitz entitled The Wakefield Plays. The second and third parts, Our Father's Failing and Alfred Dies, will be staged at the Trinity Square Theater in Providence, Rhode Island, some time before 1977. What Boston audiences are now seeing at the Wilbur Theatre is the extremely promising first act of a still to be completed three act drama. Alfred the Great, when seen by itself, ultimately fails as an independent work of art, but in part one Horowitz gives indications of the originality and strength of his dramatic imagination that should keep appetites sharp as we await parts two and three.

The play is essentially a series of confrontations--between Alfred, who returns to his hometown after an absence of 15 years, and Margaret and Will, who have never left; between Alfred and Emily; between Margaret and Will; between Alfred and his past. The themes that unite the characters are sexual impotence and sexual excess, the barrenness of lives imprisoned by material wealth or poverty, the lies and failures of memory that hide fear and guilt.

Several times in the course of the narrative, Alfred threatens to become bewilderingly complex as each character tries to explain what has happened to their lives in the 15 years since Alfred has moved away to the big city. In the ensuing years after his departure, Alfred has become a successful man, "a goddamned luminary" as Will sarcastically calls him. But his success has not come without a price. Alfred fears he is impotent; his wife refused to talk to him for three years; he cannot sleep because his eyes won't close.

He returns home seeking solutions to his problems. During the days he and his wife spend at the home of Margaret and Will, they force their hosts to make a series of confessions--about the bitter emptiness of their marriage, about Margaret's infidelities and Will's brutal jealousy. Long repressed memories of hatred and disappointment are unburied and the civilized defenses that had checked the rage of each character are progressively stripped away. The audience, along with the people on the stage, struggles from fiction to a separate reality, while layers of deception are removed only to expose new deceits.

Alfred the Great's near-success as an independent work is due in large part to the inspired direction of Jack O'Brien and the sensitive performances of his uniformly excellent cast. Richard Kneeland as Alfred, Maria Tucci as his wife Emily, Christina Pickles as his old girlfriend Margaret, and George Martin as Margaret's husband Will, are all perfectly suited for their roles and give characterizations deepened and colored by sympathetic understanding.

The play is saved from being overly grave and melodramatic by Horowitz's fine ear for both the poetic and comic rhythms of natural speech. His characters speak that elliptical language made familiar by Pinter--a series of monologues that only rarely intersect, made up of short-circuited sentences, non-sequiturs and repetitions. The special idiom of the absurdist play demands from its actors a particular sensitivity to the purely aural qualities of speech as well as split-second timing and O'Brien never lets his cast miss a beat.

Each of the actors in this production manages to find a unique and distinctive voice for his or her character that brings the author's conception to life. The pugnacious bluntness of Martin's Will contrasts sharply with the desperately self-mocking sophistication of Kneeland's Alfred; Tucci's coolly arch Emily and the naive kookiness of Christina Pickles's Margaret are carefully crafted studies in opposition. These characterizations, expressed as much through inflection and gesture as in the words spoken, add greatly to the play's dramatic intensity.

UNFORTUNATELY, Eugene Lee's set does not provide a physical context for the actors that can compare with the highly-nuanced emotional context they create. The play is set in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a small town north of Boston. All action takes place in the home of Margaret and Will. Lee captures the bleak and barren quality of their marriage in the dingy walls and sparse furnishing of his interior but somehow he fails to convey the sense that this is a distinctly American environment. Instead, the setting seems more suited to Pinter's Birthday Party than a play set in New England in 1974. Without being insistent or exclusive, Horowitz addresses himself to some peculiarly American obsessions and drives in Alfred the Great and it is important that the environment his characters inhabit reflects this.

Alfred the Great remains only a beginning--we need to know the middle and the end of the Wakefield Cycle before we can really judge whether Horowitz has made a dramatic statement of enduring value. Part one ends just as the last layers of deceit and delusion are being torn away. The process of self discovery for both the characters and the audience has just begun--a process that will hopefully be soon completed.