April 29 (Bloomberg) -- There are voyeurs known as ambulance chasers, and then there is a subset known as theatrical ambulance chasers, who boast of having seen such monumental fiascos as “Moose Murders,” which closed almost before the final curtain. To them I heartily commend Craig Lucas’s “The Singing Forest,” which should close after Act One, before, amazingly, things manage to get even worse in the New York premiere at the Public Theater.

Lucas is a trampoline playwright: He takes giant leaps, at times landing solidly on his feet, at others, flying off into outer space. “The Singing Forest” finds him in highest orbit.

The play has been kicking around for years, shedding some of its three-plus hours; it’s now down to 2 hours, 45 minutes with two 15-minute intermissions.

“Forest,” starring venerable Olympia Dukakis and smart young Jonathan Groff, operates on two levels, inspired (if that’s the word) by Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself, starting as tragedy and recurring as farce. The tragedy here takes place in 1930s Vienna, where Jews like Sigmund Freud (a character in the play) and his circle face the worst unless they can flee.

Starbucks Denizens

The farce takes place in New York circa 2000, where some of the survivors are reduced to hanging out at Starbucks and Alcoholics Anonymous, when not offering telephone sex to callers with psychological problems. The main character sunk to this is Loe Rieman, the connecting link, via memory, between the epochs. This allows Dukakis to slink silently around the stage during the Vienna scenes, when Susan Pourfar plays young Loe.

Among old Loe’s clients is a troubled young man named Gray, who, though heterosexual, assumes the identity of Jules Ahmad, a reclusive gay zillionaire who pays Gray to impersonate him in psychotherapy sessions and get treatment in absentia for his nightmares. Gray has racy experiences with two shrinks. One, the uncloseted Dr. Shar Unger, lusts for him; the other, closeted Dr. Oliver Pfaff, who happens to be Loe’s son and Unger’s former lover, may also yearn for him, but now has a young love-toy, Laszlo Fickes, who previously serviced Unger.

Jules Ahmad, by the way, is Pfaff’s nephew, the estranged son of severely disturbed Bertha, herself the estranged daughter of Loe, played by Deborah Offner, who also plays Anna Freud in the Vienna scenes. Are you with me?

Nazi SS, Too

Each of the nine actors doubles as a somehow connected or corresponding figure in both locales. They are often forced into quick changes, as when a character, vainly knocking on a door as a rejected gay lover, becomes, when he bursts in, a threatening Nazi storm trooper in full uniform.

There are plots within plots, as well as subplots within subplots, which I can’t begin to go into. Suffice it to say that story, dialogue, characters -- none is of enough interest to go beyond first befuddling, then benumbing us, for which even Marx had no theory.

I understand that there is much veiled autobiography in the play, which Lucas says he has been writing all of this life and expects to continue doing so in the next. Should he finish it then, perhaps the time will have come for it to go into production.

The good Dukakis does nicely enough, unlikely though she is as a purveyor of phone sex. So do Jonathan Groff, Rob Campbell, Mark Blum and Pierre Epstein. But even the less good performers deserve better than this.

Mark Wing-Davey’s direction can do little to remedy matters. But Lucas may yet do better, perhaps with something he does not spend two lifetimes on, not to mention three agonizing hours of our one.

Through May 17 at 425 Lafayette St. Information: +1-212- 967-7555; http://www.publictheater.org. Rating: (Zero stars)

What the Stars Mean:
****       Excellent
***        Good
**         Average
*          Poor
(No stars) Worthless

(John Simon is the New York drama critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: John Simon in New York at jis1925@aol.com.

Last Updated: April 28, 2009 22:30 EDT