Posted: Sun., Nov. 9, 2003, 10:00pm PT The Caretaker (American Airlines Theater; 740 seats; $80 top) A Roundabout Theater Co. presentation of a play in three acts by Harold Pinter. Directed by David Jones. Mick - Aidan Gillen Aston - Kyle MacLachlan Davies - Patrick Stewart By CHARLES ISHERWOOD The menace has gone missing in the Roundabout Theater Co.'s revival of Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker." Suspense takes a holiday, too, in David Jones' oddly cozy and ultimately wan staging of a play that should positively ooze unease. Stripped of its clammy atmosphere, Pinter's chilling inquiry into the lower depths of human isolation appears here as a dawdling domestic comedy about a bum who takes up with a pair of eccentrics. First seen on Broadway in 1962, the play was Pinter's introduction to America. Its plot is barren: A belligerent tramp is offered refuge in a grimy, relic-strewn attic by a strangely remote young man and his more sinister brother. Distrustful and persnickety, he gradually makes himself at home, seeking to ingratiate himself with first one and then the other, uncertain where the power of protection really lies. The elaborate dialogue is pungent, peculiar and inconsequential. The gentler brother, Aston, talks dreamily of his ambition to build a shed in the backyard of the building. The slick, merciless Mick alternately teases and torments Davies, while ruminating, in hilarious detail, on his own ideas for redecorating the digs. (John Lee Beatty, usually a master of genteel realism, has a field day here, evincing a hungry avidity for the abundant squalor of Aston's jumble shop of a flat.) Davies natters on about the injustices he's been subject to and the inadequacies of Aston's charitable offerings; the shoes offered to replace Davies' tattered sandals just won't do, and there's an awful draft from the window, too. Scrubbed free of obvious meaning, the play's surface became a blank page on which all manner of theories have been written. Harold Clurman opined that Mick, the alternately soothing and tormenting brother, was a kind of "godhead," his psychologically damaged brother Aston a Christ figure, the bum Davies a symbol of humanity itself. The playwright has always resisted attempts to tease out allegorical meaning, insisting that what you see is what you get. And the play doesn't necessarily require "significance" to be theatrically effective. Suspense accrues in the dramatic void where traditional conceptions of plot and character normally reside, as the smallest shifts in the dynamic of power between these three men take on an eerie significance. Unfortunately, what we see -- and get -- in Jones' production is a meticulous but dry reading of the text. It lacks the subterranean emotional charge that gives the play a macabre magnetism. Patrick Stewart gives a vivid, scrupulously detailed performance as Davies, an image of human fear and need in a naked state, snatching greedily at comfort but always expecting the fly in the ointment. Devoid of home, job, resources and even his proper identity -- he speaks confidently of going to Sudcup to retrieve his all-important "personal papers" -- Davies is a shabby rodent of a man, his nerve ends flaring up at every perceived slight. Stewart fills out the grotesque contours of the role ably, barking out suspicious queries in a brusque growl, his eyes shifting endlessly, as if looking for the nearest escape route or preparing to dodge the next blow. His rich voice makes Davies' flights of delusional braggadocio particularly funny, but Stewart's tendency to reduce the character's eccentricities to lovable shtick also robs the character of some of his eerie pathos. If Davies does battle with the lonely void of existence by refusing to admit his need even as he hungrily seeks to meet it, Aston's tactic is simply to withdraw. But Kyle MacLachlan's studied but hollow performance doesn't draw us into the character's damaged mind; his recital of the crucial act-two monologue in which Aston describes his cruel treatment in a mental home, and the flight from human contact that followed, feels more vacant than it should. MacLachlan might, in fact, be more naturally suited to the role of Mick, the cheery sadist. And Aidan Gillen, who play Mick here, suggests, in the play's silent opening moments, that he certainly has the transparency that's just right for Aston. That said, Gillen's Mick is deliciously nasty, the play's most effortlessly persuasive performance. To begin with, Gillen is the only one of the actors who seems to naturally inhabit the play's lower-middle-class British milieu. He gets much theatrical mileage out of the spooky contrast between Mick's soft-spoken charm and his threatening physical presence. And the flinty look in his eyes suggests that his cruelty is his own defense against an indifferent world. The play's final scene should send a sweaty, existential chill into the auditorium, as Davies' pleas for mercy are met with a small but potent act of violence from Mick, and an ever more remote silence from Aston. We need to feel that this squalid comedy of manipulation and need does indeed resonate with primal meaning, shedding a glaring light on man's pitiless and lonely essence. But too much tension has drained from the stage during this intelligent but juiceless production's preceding three hours. The play ends on a quiet whimper to match poor Davies' own. Set, John Lee Beatty; costumes, Jane Greenwood; lighting, Peter Kaczorowski; sound, Scott Lehrer; production stage manager, Matthew Silver. Artistic director, Todd Haimes. Opened Nov. 9, 2003. Reviewed Nov. 6. Running time: 2 HOURS, 45 MIN.