What an odd mixture of inspired comedy, sudden horror, and plain guff is John Guare's "Landscape of the Body"! Whenever his imagination takes over, whenever his astonishing dramatic talent for creating characters and lines and scenes is let loose, he is invaluable; it is only his abstract thoughts, as spoken by the characters in a number of set pieces, that tend to become trying. The play … begins aboard a ferry from Cape Cod to Nantucket. Betty, the heroine, burdened with overflowing shopping bags, walks to the rail, where she is joined by a man in a Groucho Marx false face. When he removes the mask after a few unsuccessful attempts at pickup conversation, she recognizes him as the Greenwich Village detective who has been questioning her for months about the murder of her fourteen-year-old son, Bert, and attempting to trap her into a confession. Her story is then...