BEAUTIFUL CHILD

At the Vineyard Theatre, 108 E. 15th St.; (212) 353-0303. Through March 28. .

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A proper drawing room invaded by scarcely utterable atrocities has become a fairly familiar comic motif.

Take Edward Albee’s “The Goat” – in which a successful, married man’s affair with a barnyard beast is played out against the complacent certainties of couch and cocktail.

I’ve found little satisfaction in such such smug and self-satisfied allegories, and even less from third-rate imitations like Nicky Silver’s “Beautiful Child,” now playing at the Vineyard Theatre.

Here is a vast suburban drawing room (tastefully designed by Richard Hoover) that is just waiting to be assaulted.

And assaulted it is, by a screwball family. The father (George Grizzard) is having a hard time getting rid of his mistress (Alexandra Gersten Vassilaros), a wacky broad who wants her lover to run away with her, which he has no intention of doing.

The mother (Penny Fuller, in a full-throated performance) is one of those chic, cocktail-swilling wisecrack-spouting horrors beloved of these plays.

This couple’s marriage, such as it is, is brought to a crisis when their son, Isaac (Steven Pasquale), returns home.

Isaac is a polite, bright, attractive portrait-painter and teacher of around 30, who happens to be having an affair with one of his students – a boy who is 8 years old.

No metaphors or goats for Silver, who has long played with serious psychological topics in plays like “Food Chain” and “Pterodactyls.”

Isaac’s parents work out a punishment for him that’s straight out of Greek tragedy. But by then none of this is believable, or even interesting.

The play is directed by Terry Kinney, the firebrand from Chicago, who perhaps is more at home in plays like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” rather than drawing-room comedies like this.