Andrew Bovell's drama was a hit Down Under and has been seen in England, but something appears to have been lost in its translation to the American stage. Described as a "psychological thriller," "murder mystery" and "partner-swapping satire," it is, in fact, D) none of the above.

The play is gussied up with fancy structural tricks that may serve to distract some from the generic nature of the writing. In the first scene, two couples in separate hotel rooms prepare to engage in adulterous liaisons. We hear the couples describing their ambivalence and insecurity in exactly the same words, said at exactly the same time. The joke, presumably, is the commonplace nature of their exchanges ("I haven't done this sort of thing before," "We hardly know each other," "It's been a long time since I've been with another man"), but exactly who is the butt of this joke? The audience?

Karen Allen and Margaret Colin are the dissatisfied wives, Kevin Anderson and Michel R. Gill the unhappy husbands. Later wife meets wife and husband meets husband, in separate bars, after the couples have broken apart over the (aborted) liaisons in scenes that contain more simultaneous jabber.

Mysterious events eventually begin to crop up in the middle of this banal marital-angst drama. Anderson's Leon delivers a numbingly long monologue describing an unusual encounter with an unhappy man at the beach, and Allen's Jane, not to be outdone, regales her returning husband with her ominous suspicions about next-door neighbor Nick. She witnessed his arrival home late one night with face scratched up and a woman's shoe in his hand.

Attention, alas, must be paid to these interminable anecdotes, since the characters in them will pop up later (Anderson playing the possibly nefarious neighbor, Gill the guy at the beach). Their stories, in turn, connect with those of new folks we meet in the final scene. One of the characters eventually disappears into a swamp; regrettably, the rest stick around and keep talking.

Bovell's interlocking structure is certainly clever, but behavior has to be stretched past credibility to keep it intact. (When her car breaks down on a portentously deserted stretch of highway, a woman spends her last quarters leaving windy messages on her home answering machine, filling in her absent husband on her fears and insecurities, rather than calling, say, the highway patrol or the police or AAA.)

Played out on a chic set by Richard Hoover that enhances the play's house-of-mirrors qualities, in dim lighting by Brian MacDevitt that clues us in to the dark portent of it all, "Speaking in Tongues" is reminiscent of Patrick Marber's "Closer" in style, theme and tone, but Bovell's writing is as empty of originality and insight as Marber's was rich in them. The play purports to have deep thoughts to deliver about the darknesses of the human heart, the difficulties of communication between men and women and the subjective nature of experience. But it simply does not have the matter to meet its ambitions.

The actors deserve varying measures of sympathy. Colin expertly differentiates her two characters, though perhaps she's being punished for her good work by being saddled with Jess Goldstein's most unflattering costumes. Anderson injects some much-needed color into the proceedings as the lower-class Nick. Allen's unhappy wife Jane is a lot better than her rather melodramatic shrink. Gill starts out fine but gets worse as the play wears on, aided in his unfortunate progress by the increasingly pretentious nature of his dialogue.

In the last scene, he plays a philandering man whose wife has disappeared, and speaks in vacuous, high-toned phrases that smack of daytime soaps: "Don't judge me. Not yet," he says to the cop interviewing him. "Think ill of me later, if you have to, but for now just listen to what I have to say, because I'm talking about things that are hard now, deep things that have been left unsaid for too long." To which a numbed audience member can only respond: Why not leave well enough alone, fella?

Jane/Valerie ..... Karen Allen

Leon/Nick ........ Kevin Anderson

Sonja/Sarah ...... Margaret Colin

Peter/Neil/John .. Michel R. Gill

A Roundabout Theater Co. presentation of a play in two acts by Andrew Bovell. Directed by Mark Clements. Sets, Richard Hoover; costumes, Jess Goldstein; lighting, Brian MacDevitt; music and sound, Scott Myers; projections, Elaine J. McCarthy; production stage manager, Jay Adler. Artistic director, Todd Haimes. Opened Nov. 15, 2001. Reviewed Nov. 14.