In spite of tangential treatment of some interesting ideas, "Space," the latest play from Tina Landau ("Floyd Collins", "Stonewall: Night Variations") fails to give an audience much to chew on.

"Space" is the story of an egomaniacal neuropsychiatrist whose beliefs are thrown into question when he's approached by several otherwise normal-seeming patients who claim to have been abducted by aliens.

In the play's program notes, Landau, who wrote the play, as well as directed its inaugural run at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, boasts that she's never read a science fiction novel. Perhaps she might be better off not advertising this fact, because there's a long, rich history of alien abduction literature and, in that context, this work feels more than a bit naive.

The egomaniacal center fails to hold

As "Dr. Allan Saunders," actor Francis Guinan seems sorely misplaced as the center of the story. His character's lack of compassion and humanity, coupled with extreme self-involvement, detract from his credibility as a revered member of the mental health field, not to mention an audience's ability to care one iota about his fate.

The stories of Saunders' patients have a lot more potential to grab the imagination. Imagine that you are a perfectly normal person of average to above-average intelligence, and suddenly you see the kind and loving eyes of an alien as it applies the legendary anal probe. What do you do?

Now that's a conflict. Do you risk your credibility, relationships and perhaps even the custody of your children to try to communicate a life-transforming experience to those around you, or do you keep it to yourself in a bid to retain the "normalcy" you know you'll never have again?

If Landau had allowed the three disparate characters of Saunders' desperate patients -- a genius Black bike messenger (J. August Richards); a cheery, normal housewife and school administrator (Mary Pat Gleason) and a young gay man (Devin McFallen) -- to interact with each other rather than through Saunders as a conduit for their experiences, she could have underscored the drama inherent in these questions.

Instead, it's glossed over in the exposition. Landau's play spends too much time on the ill-advised romance between Saunders and Dr. Bernadette Jump Cannon (Shannon Cochran).

Ill-advised? Watching these two maneuver around each other had the sad feeling of sitting in a restaurant next to a couple of forty-somethings on an obviously-doomed first date -- especially when it's obvious that, because of some need or loneliness, she's trying to ignore the fact that the guy is a walking red flag.

Cochran gives the best performance in the show, speaking volumes without saying a word. However, while her grounded stillness provides the show with its most eloquent moments, these moments of calm only highlight how annoying Saunders' endless, nervous prattle is.

Towards the end of the play, the mismatched couple succeeds in evoking some awe at the grandeur of space and our connections with the cosmos, but alas, it's too little, too late.

The set of "Space" is beautiful. The rounded stage softly slopes up to a gently curving ramp that provides a backdrop for Landau to project evocative images of the desert or the galaxy, occasionally to moving effect.

Less successful is the toga-clad singer (Karen Fineman) descending slowly down the ramp singing "oooooh-ooooooh" type space music. Sadly, this was not the only one of Landau's staging choices that bordered on the silly.

One must at least laud the playwright for her ambition in choosing space and alien abduction as her topic. Indeed, it would be difficult for any writer to present as a given the idea that there are sentient beings from the great beyond who are trying to reach us -- a notion that many would find inconceivable or absurd.

Depending on your point of view, it is either a failure of Landau's work or, accidentally, her greatest success, that the possibility of life "out there" ends up being more believable than most of the cardboard earthlings she's created on the stage.