ART LOOKS INWARD on itself and finds art, looking in on itself, and back; the artist portrays the artist portraying himself, and lands somewhere in between. Asymptotic maunderings, these, on the ineffable relation between art and the artist that animates Mark Leib's brilliant and vertiginously profound Terry by Terry, a new play which joined the American Repertory's repertoire last Friday at the Loeb. Terry is obsessively theatrical--it concerns a playwright and the play he has written, and its most visceral impact is on other writers. But to characterize such concerns as esoteric, to cubbyhole theater as some sort of elite hobby or idle plaything, is to miss the point: art is life, and Terry by Terry confronts the possible extinction of both.

Terry by Terry consists of two one-act plays: Terry Won't Talk and Terry Rex. Word of mouth has already decreed that Terry Won't Talk is the superior play; I would disagree, and add that Terry Rex, the second play in performance, is the heart of Leib's drama, and the first an essential gloss on it. Terry Rex presents Terry (Robertson Dean), the young author of Terry Won't Talk, (which is being performed "downtown"). Terry is tortured by his inability to write, a block he tries to dissolve through both hallucinations induced by lack of sleep and random acts of verbal cruelty toward his girlfriend Kathy (Lisa Sloan) and his friends from college days, Adrienne (Marianne Owen) and Wheeler (Kenneth Ryan). There is no indication by the end of the play that his problem is solved; to the contrary, it seems that Terry will never write successfully again.

Hyperintellectuality is the taproot of his paralysis, an acute self-consciousness and an encyclopedic, even frightening, knowledge of what has already been done in the theater and what little there is that remains to be done. Leib masterfully limns what W.J. Bate has pithily called "the burden of the past" with a virtuoso monologue in which Terry splices memorized quotations from a drama anthology while Wheeler, a translator, punctuates with footnotes. Terry declaims wildly and Wheeler answers, "Hedda Gabler--I think the Reinert translation," launching Terry into another recitation, from another play, which logically follows in the train of conversation. Terry knows his predecessors in Parnassus, knows them too well, in fact, ever to join them.

This theme finds its most complete expression in the concluding dialogue, as Terry wonders whether Kathy, his dartboard and punching-bag, will throw him out:

Terry: Oh, I'd say your position at the moment is sufficiently equivocal where you could get away with either. The abuse you're putting up with is certainly severe enough to produce a sort of Doll's House in reverse--"Terry--you're leaving." On the other hand, there's obviously been some compelling reason for your holding on to me even this long--so if you did a Streetcar and kept me, I don't think you'd be sinning against conventional psychology.

Kathy: I don't like either one.

Terry: I don't blame you. Both have already been done, and everything in between. It's not your fault.

Terry is demonically possessed by an internal critic, bears not a monkey but John Simon on his back, constantly rasping, "Trite, trite, done already." His phobia for the commonplace, his obsession with originality, keep him not only from writing but even from talking or living without wondering whether it's all been seen on some stage before. His friends have to be Holvard Solness and Miss Julies and when they can't, when he sees them as "cardboard characters" and "cartoons," and their "soap talk" as unsuitable dialogue, he abandons them, forgetting that the stuff of everyday life must be, by definition, commonplace. Terry wants to live as the artist of the new and the hero of the new, and when he can'the hardly wants to live at all. As the curtain falls Terry is very close to dead.

The internality of action in Terry Rex (much is thought, little happens) presents a dramatic dilemma for Leib, what might be called the problem of the inactive character. Talk, even when it is not "soap talk," is still talk, and begins, after a while, to beg for action. But Leib prefaces Terry Rex with the performance of Terry Won't Talk. This play, after all, is the product of Terry's mind, and serves to mirror that mind, highlighting in dumbshow the roiling preoccupations which, although related to Terry's burden of the past, more directly prevent him from writing.

Terry Won't Talk springs from the refusal of Terry Blade (Mark Linn-Baker) to communicate with his family; as sister Suzy (Marilyn Caskey) announces at the outset, "Momma! Terry won't talk!" Terry becomes a sort of walking Rorschach blot, upon whom each of the characters projects an explanation for his silence: his mother (Elizabeth Norment) thinks someone lied to him; his teacher (Nancy Mayans) thinks he's ill; the principal (John Bottoms) sees it as the silence of a poet; and Mrs. Blade's lover, Chester, who seems to be a regular reader of Existential Digest, ascribes it to despair:

You're a bright little guy, you catch things other people miss altogether. You look out of those eyes, and what do you see? A sick world... A chaotic world, spastic, anarchic, deity-deficient. People tell you you've got a future, but the only future you can count on starts six feet under.

Terry's silence leads to his being sent home from school and, ultimately, institutionalized.

The universe portrayed in Terry Won't Talk follows the absurdist archetype--it's only "new and fascinating," as Wheeler says in Terry Rex, "in the sense that a man who's been shipwrecked on a desert island for two hundred years might find a telephone new and fascinating." It includes the disutility of language: language is only dinner-table "chatter," and all attempts to get Terry to verbalize his meaning fail (Linn-Baker goes through the play without a word). There is the failure even of rational thought, as epitomized in the trivializing portrait of Chester. We get the dehumanizing effects of technology in an ingenious scene in which Terry's classmates, forming pistons with their fists, erase a girl's face.

Foremost, Terry Won't Talk embraces a thoroughgoing relativism, a denial of all values, an exposition of Wittgenstein's dictum (included in the program notes) that "all propositions are of equal value." As Mr. Blade tells Chester, "There's always an alternative," a meaningless choice between meaningless poles. People talk in paralleled non sequiturs:

Mrs. Blade: Had a nice day?