In case you have bought the way World War II’s “greatest generation” has been idealized, playwright Sharr White now asks theatergoers to see those noble souls in a new, darker light. His melodramatic play Six Years considers the plight of that generation through the microcosm of shattered war veteran Phil Granger and his anguished wife, Meredith.

We observe them in five scenes, separated in time by, yup, six years, ranging from the opening vignette in 1949 through to 1973. While the play centers on the Grangers’ relationship, their situation is informed by the souring of America, as Six Years moves from the post-World War II optimism to the anti-establishment rebellion of the ’60s to the national schism of the Vietnam era.

Sour is also an apt adjective for Phil and Meredith’s marriage. Challenged by the forced separation when he went off to war, it is further jeopardized by the emotional damage he incurs in battle, diagnosed dismissively by the military as “exhaustion.” When we first see Phil, he is glassy-eyed with catatonic bewilderment, unable to put a full sentence together, a condition from which he never fully recovers over the play’s quarter-century.

For that matter, the marriage never progresses much, in the face of Phil’s disorder, Meredith’s infidelities and the strain of their sketchily written son, who grows up eager to fly off to Vietnam, perhaps to face his father’s fate or worse. Perhaps because of the episodic nature of the script’s five brief scenes, White is never able to impart much depth to his characters and the effect is disappointingly soap-operatic.

What’s worse, so little changes for the two of them -- Phil remains rudderless and confused and Meredith is awfully shrill throughout – and that has a way of keeping us at arm’s length from the characters.

Despite the underwritten role, Todd Allen Durkin manages to draw the audience into Phil’s plight with a performance of aching extremes, from deadened expressions to fits of rage. In contrast, Margery Lowe’s Meredith is settles for a single note of strident anger, where White surely did not intend to turn the audience off to her.

The always interesting Gregg Weiner lends solid, though thankless, support as Meredith’s brother and Betsy Graver makes a lot of her single scene as an airport cocktail lounge pick-up, initially drawn to the transparently lonely Phil.

Maybe the summer production budget was insufficient (or maybe most of the money went to Michael McKeever’s Stuff), but this is the first Tim Bennett scenic design in memory that looks so cheap and generic. Better are the period costumes by Alberto Arroyo, aided by a succession of wigs that help emphasize the march of time.

Still, the clothes are not enough to fill in the empty spaces in the characters of the story line, and Six Years is not enough to hold our interest -- or our empathy -- for its amble through time.

SIX YEARS, Caldwell Theatre Company, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, Sept. 4. Tickets: $38-$50. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.

Ever since Tom Brokaw wrote about the men who went off to fight World War II and the women who sacrificed on the home front awaiting their return, they have been known as “The Greatest Generation.” But in the way his grandfather’s contemporaries had been idealized, playwright Sharr White sensed that the full story had yet to be told.

That led him to write Six Years, the theatrical saga of Phil and Meredith Granger, seen from 1949 to 1973, in five separate scenes spaced, yes, six years apart. And in his selection of the years, White shows his characters against a backdrop of the post-war suburban boom, the optimism of the early ’60s and the divisiveness of the Vietnam conflict. As the second shoe to drop in the Caldwell Theatre’s summer examination of America throughout the 20^th century, the Boca Raton company presents the 2006 drama’s Florida premiere.

“What’s happened to us since ‘The Greatest Generation’ was published is we tended to take the complexity out of the experience,” White suggests. “And I really wanted to write a story about what I think is a lost generation of Americans.”

The play opens in a motel room, where we are introduced to Phil, who has returned from fighting overseas with that we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. But in the late ’40s, it was simply and dismissively called “exhaustion.”

“In World War II, we just literally did not have an adequate way to explain what was happening to people,” says White. “This play is about people who literally don’t have the words for what they’re experiencing. There’s a lot of language in this play where the characters can’t finish their sentences, they can’t find the right things to say.”

White researched events of the wars that touch this couple’s lives, to the extent of drawing on the newspaper accounts of the specific days he depicts. But he emphasizes that it was important to keep the social changes in the background as he focused on the human drama.

“For me, the play is really about the relationship between these two people,” says Todd Allen Durkin, cast as Phil. “ The war and the PTSD and all that are just there to show how it affects their relationship and the choices they make moving forward. But at the heart of it, it’s still a love story.”

Margery Lowe, who plays Meredith, agrees.

“They’re two people who love each other and want to be with each other, but throughout the years, obstacles keep getting in their way,” Lowe said. “Ultimately this play is talking about marriage, about relationships, about a couple that really wants to be with each other.”

Six Years ends four decades ago, but it is likely to bring to the audience’s mind more recent wars our country has been involved in. “Since we’re in a war now, the reference takes care of itself,” says Clive Cholerton, the Caldwell’s chief and the director of Six Years. “For me, it’s what I want Caldwell to be all about: That idea that there’s no way we can know who we are right now unless we know where we came from.”

SIX YEARS. Caldwell Theatre Co., 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. From Friday, Aug. 12, through Sunday, Sept. 4. Tickets: $38-$50. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.

The political complexities of the Middle East conflict have been pared away in Israeli student Ilan Hatsor’s 1990 drama Masked, the gripping tale of three Palestinian brothers bonded by blood, but alienated from each other by a lack of trust.

The densely packed, 70-minute play was produced off-Broadway in 2007 and is now receiving its South Florida premiere at Coral Gables’ GableStage, where director Joe Adler mines it for maximum visceral impact.

Masked takes place in a West Bank butcher shop whose hanging carcasses and blood-spattered walls foreshadow the violence to come. It is the workplace of youngest brother Khalid (Abdiel Gabriel), who receives an unexpected visit from middle brother Na’im (Nick Duckart), a rebel freedom fighter who had taken to the nearby hills to elude Israeli soldiers. They are eventually joined by Daoud (Carlos Orizondo), their older brother, suspected of being a traitor to the Palestinian cause, and soon to be interrogated and tortured by guerrillas.

So Na’im has an hour to arrive at the facts, learn of his brother’s allegiances and possibly save his hide. But the truth is a shifting reality, as the three of them circle each other, peeling away layers, leading to a conclusion which is both unexpected and inevitable.

Hatsor – whose play was translated into English from Hebrew by Michael Taub -- keeps the focus on the personal, avoiding the issues that have kept the Israeli-Palestinian tensions simmering for decades. As a result, Masked takes on a universality of any two warring nations, and, of course, there are many to choose from.

Adler has a solid three-man cast, led by the versatile Duckart, a steely combatant whose emotional shifts are mercurial. Orizondo is even more hard to pin down, as he reveals his character’s shadings. And keep an eye on Gabriel, the seeming pawn in the family struggle, who grows before our eyes.

While only a little more than an hour, Masked is a full evening of theater, a wrenching experience in the GableStage manner.

MASKED. GableStage at the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables. Through Sunday. Tickets: $47.50. Call: (305) 445-1119.

You’ve heard of the three Bs -- Bach, Brahms and Beethoven? Well, the Kravis Center has announced that next season it will present the three Ls -- Larry the Cable Guy, Larry King and a tribute show called Elvis Lives. Uh, didn’t the Kravis used to be a center for the performing arts?

The West Palm Beach complex will be celebrating its 20^th anniversary season beginning this fall with its usual eclectic array of acts from highbrow to low, though perhaps tilting more to the low than in the past. In case you were wondering what King would do after his CNN interview show, you can see him on the Kravis stage in what the season announcement calls “a brand-new, hilarious stage show that gives his fans a humorous and insightful look at his life.” (Jan. 24)

What, too weighty for you? Then how about the pairing of daytime TV’s Regis Philbin with Emmy-winning soap star Susan Lucci (Dec. 30)? What exactly they will do that evening is a stumper, but the Kravis offers a hint by describing Philbin as a “crooner supreme.” Larry the Cable Guy is a veteran of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, so his fans know what to expect on Nov. 19, and the Kravis further justifies the booking by noting that this year marks the 20^th anniversary of Larry’s career.

Those convinced that Elvis Presley died 34 years ago may have their confidence all shook up by Elvis Lives (Jan. 23), billed as “the ultimate Elvis tribute artist event,” featuring finalists from -- get this -- the worldwide Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist Contest. Also in the faux-concert tribute vein will be The Official Blues Brothers Revue (Feb. 9), licensed at least by Dan Aykroyd and the John Belushi estate, and the return of The Pink Floyd Experience (March 4), in a set that will include the former rock band’s entire 1975 Wish You Were Here album performed live.

Actual headliners slated to appear at the Kravis next season include singers k.d. lang (Oct. 8), Linda Eder and Steve Tyrell (Jan. 3), Patti LaBelle (Feb. 4), Bernadette Peters (Feb. 10), Johnny Mathis (March 2), Neil Sedaka (March 30) and Patti LuPone (April 4). Among the celebrated musicians in the season will be Pinchas Zukerman (Jan. 4-5), Joshua Bell (Jan. 31), Michael Feinstein (Feb. 3), Diana Krall (Feb. 11), Chris Botti (March 3), Itzhak Perlman (March 6) and, yes, Yanni (April 17-18).

Vying against Larry the Cable Guy for the season’s comedy honors will be Wanda Sykes (Dec. 11), Second City Improv All-Stars (Dec. 30-Jan. 1), Dennis Miller (Jan. 5), Jackie Mason (Jan. 31) and Martin Short (March 28). And, OK, classical music has hardly been shortchanged, since the Kravis has also booked the Munich Symphony (Nov. 15-16), Emerson String Quartet (Dec. 6), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (Jan. 4-5), Tchaikovsky St. Petersburg State Orchestra (Jan. 24), Cleveland Orchestra (Jan. 25), Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra (Feb. 8-9) and the Minnesota Orchestra (March 11).

For the previously announced Kravis on Broadway series, the center confirms that Palm Beach favorite son George Hamilton will headline the production of La Cage aux Folles (Feb. 14-19). Leading off the series will be The Addams Family (Nov. 8-13), whose plot happens to be identical to La Cage’s, followed by the popular revival of Hair (Jan. 10-15), the Twyla Tharp-meets-Frank-Sinatra dance concert Come Fly Away (March 13-18) and the re-conceived 25^th anniversary production of Les Miserables (May 16-26).

For the complete Kravis Center schedule, go to its website at www.kravis.org. Tickets to the season’s events go on sale to the public Sept. 24.

Prolific and eclectic. You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get with a Michael McKeever play. But if you don’t like one, don’t worry, there will be another along in six months.

As it happens, the Davie-based playwright-performer is serving up a winner currently with his new dark comedy, Stuff, now receiving its world premiere at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton through July 31.

It chronicles the eccentric lives of Homer and Langley Collyer, the infamous Harlem hoarders, who amassed ceiling-high stacks of newspapers, pianos and other collectible curiosities in their seedy mansion, where they died amid the clutter in 1947.

The obsessive Collyer brothers have been a fascination of McKeever’s since he was a boy. “My mom would come into my and my brother’s bedroom and say, ‘Oh, my god, it’s the Collyer mansion’,” McKeever recalls. “I grew up hearing ‘Collyer mansion,’ but I had no idea what it was,” beyond a negative role model of what his own room should not look like.

As a result, he has grown up with an aversion to becoming a hoarder. “Me? Oh, god, no. I definitely have a type A personality,” says McKeever. “I keep things that mean a lot to me, things from my youth. But I’m more, ‘You’re done with this magazine? OK, throw it away.’ If I were to keep everything, I‘d have a Collyer mansion.”

Trying for historical accuracy without limiting his dramatic license, McKeever looks at the Collyers at two points in their lives -- 1929, just months before the stock market crash, when their hoarding began in earnest, and 1947, when their acquisitive impulses reached a conclusion.

What makes Stuff so interesting is how McKeever uses these two squandered lives of such promise to explore major themes, like the financial and racial inequities in society and the complex gravitational pull of family. There is plenty to laugh at in Stuff, but they are not empty laughs, as the play paints a surprisingly thought-provoking portrait of life -- albeit not very typical life -- in the 20th century.

“People ask me if it’s about hoarding and I say not really, it’s about this really twisted, wonderfully goofy, eccentric family,” says McKeever. “To me, the most interesting thing about them isn’t the fact that they collected all this stuff, but the dynamic between the two brothers and, for that matter, the mother as well. And to me, it’s all Oedipal, it all goes back to mom.”

As the first act illustrates, Homer and Langley led two very symbiotic, yet antagonistic lives. Each has ambitions beyond his given life of privilege, but those dreams are invariably quashed by their mother, Susie, bitter from her own failed opera career and the desertion of her husband. Homer yearns to buy some independence by purchasing the house across Fifth Avenue and becoming a landlord. Langley wants to resurrect his concert career as a classical pianist of undetermined talent. But Momma knows best, or at least how to manipulate her offspring and keep them under her thumb.

There are hints of the beginnings of the Collyers’ hoarding instincts in Act One, but after intermission -- thanks to the ingenuity and resources of Caldwell scenic designer Tim Bennett -- the mansion has gone to seed, filled with clutter forming a barricade of collected stuff, which hems in Homer and Langley and claustrophobically confines the action to a small downstage center area. There the brothers have also gone to seed, particularly Homer, now blind and disheveled, looking and behaving like a fugitive from a Samuel Beckett play.

Stuff is not only McKeever’s best script in quite a while -- probably since his Carbonell Award winner Melt -- but he has given himself a major acting plum in Homer, which he handles with impressive skill. His Act One performance does not break new ground, being a wisecracking whiner who gets tossed about, but his work in the second half shows a depth of feeling that is crucial to the play’s emotional core.

Director Clive Cholerton juggles the comedy and pathos ably, drawing strong performances from the rest of the four-member cast. Angie Radosh is genteel and iron-fisted as Mother Collyer, whose indulgence and disapproval are instrumental in sending her sons off on their rudderless existence. Nicholas Richberg (Langley) is everything Homer is not, except neurotic, and Marckenson Charles provides crucial support in two varied characters who stand in for the world outside the Collyers’ mansion walls.

While his main characters are certainly extreme, McKeever hopes he can draw an audience to their side. “What I’m trying to do in putting these characters together, is for the audience to have great empathy towards them, to see that underneath all the craziness are two really, really likeable guys. Despite their abuse towards each other and the outside world, they really are two loving guys,” he says. “And ultimately they are victims of the times in which they lived and in the times in which they refused to live.”

As he succinctly sums up Stuff, it is “a look back at Americana from the turn-of-the-century to the 1940s, when everything was possible and the world was changing so quickly that some people simply didn’t have a chance to catch up. It’s a funny, fascinating look at the past --- where we’ve been and how we got to where we are now.”

STUFF, by Michael McKeever; Caldwell Theatre Company, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, July 31. Tickets: $38-$50. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.