'Alice' and 'Pirates' -- two lively Victorian treasures

Beyond Therapy. Comedy by Christopher Durang. Directed by Jerry Zaks. In his new comedy, Christopher Durang gleefully spoofs the follies of trendiness and the mixed-up ways of psychiatry. In this agitated topsy-turvydom , where the behavorial presumes to pass for the moral, anything goes and nonsense runs riot.

Mr. Durang ridicules a catalog of cliches as he unfolds the rueful relationship between a confused but cautions magazine editorial worker and a mutual-fund salesman.

Durang's targets of opportunity include sexual permissiveness, the obscenity fad, TV sloganeering, and old movies. His penchant for psyche-gags is greatly aided by the furtile imagination of director Jerry Zaks and by an excellent Phoenix Theater cast. With a little more of the poignant lostness of the Gershwin Brothers' "Someone to Watch Over Me" (the play's theme song), "Beyond Therapy" might have scored not only as a laugh getter but as a touchingly meaningful oberservation of some contemporary types.