Mr. Blade: Oh, good and bad, good and bad. Stock market's up, Thank God, but commodities are down, damn it. Unfortunately, my secretary committed suicide, but luckily the boss gave me a promotion.

And in the school, the children give alternate reports on the bad and the good in history; Terry, of course, refuses to choose between them.

These ideas are not meant to be taken altogether seriously; Leib's artistry in creating a fine one-act play, and the softpedalled wryness of the pretentious program notes (including quotes from Kafka, Steiner, and Beckett, as well as Wittgenstein) only enhance the subtlety of what amounts to an elaborate parody of an absurdist drama. This is not to say that Leib does not believe in an absurdist view of the universe--he clearly does. He just doesn't believe in writing a play about it. His focus is not on the ideas themselves, which are, as Terry should be the first to see, now "commonplace," but rather on the effects of this Weltanschaung on the psychology of the artist.

The playwright Terry is Leib's modern man, a Hamletized intellectual crippled not so much by the burden of the past as by his own lack of conviction and values, unable, in the face of the failure of language and thought, even to speak, much less create a play; powerless, without a belief in absolutes, to believe in the absolute of his art; left, when the only true meaning is in silence, only to groan. Leib has, in a way, belied his vision by actually writing an eminently successful modern play (this should be called Terry by Terry by Terry), but it is no less disturbing as a result.

TERRY IS BY NO MEANS easy to stage, and the Rep's production goes far to surmount the difficulties of this complex and nuance-ridden play. Director John Madden seems, at times, apprehensive of his audience, unsure of how far to push, particularly in Terry Rex. He is on firmer turf in Terry Won't Talk, where the players' stylized panache smoothly implies a production of a production--actors playing actors. Madden's effect is boosted here by the equally stylized sets, always smaller than the stage, parading their artificiality, masterfully created by Andrew Jackness. The Terry of Terry Won't Talk is more metaphsyical than physical, but master mime Mark Linn-Baker brings him to life, sometimes with a tilt of his head, sometimes with a peculiarly appropriate shuffle of a walk. Richard Grustin is just as effective as Terry's father, turning in a suitably theatrical and vivacious performance.

But the star of Terry by Terry, if such an invidious term might be allowed, is Robertson Dean, the Terry of Terry Rex. Whining, puling, sparkling with intelligence and wit, posturing like a talented playwright who was once a very bad high school actor, Dean provokes the paradoxical mixture of sympathy and loathing the role calls for--he is us, but we don't have to like him for it. Lisa Sloan is marvelously attractive and genuine as Kathy Marianne Owen, a consummate actress when intact, is literally hobbled by a huge cast on her leg that forces her to lumber around the stage, punctuating her speech with thrusts of an orthopedic cane, in a way Adrienne, without a broken foot, never would

The only blot on the premiere is Kenneth Ryan, who lacks a sense of comic timing as Wheeler, stepping on some of Leib's best laugh lines. Which is a shame, because Terry is a very funny play, and depends on its humor to reach those for whom absurdism is not an assumption. (I am thinking particularly of the middle-aged audience that grew up with, not after Camus.)

Some have carped about Terry's length and "undergraduate" concerns, as if a play that consistently demands attention could ever be too long; as if some of the most fundamental questions for art in our times, even if they are more immediate to undergraduates, could ever be monopolized by them. It's that kind of obtuse criticism that can keep a Mark Leib from ever earning a living in America, that kind of blockish stupidity that makes Broadway an artistic Petra. Terry was an extraordinarily risky play for the Rep to choose, an unknown work by an unknown playwright which, as they probably knew, merited the risk. A play like Terry by Terry completes the Janus-head that symbolizes the company, realizes the best potential of the American Repertory Theater and the frankly visionary intentions of its artistic director.