It’s a fair question whether we go to the theater to confront realities as unpleasant and insoluble as the one presented in Harry Townsend’s  Last Stand (Stage II at City Center through February 9). Aware of this, the playwright George Eastman douses his subject—age-related decline—with a jolly array of cute one-liners. It’s like putting a bow on a bottle of castor oil.

Harry (Len Cariou), a widower living alone in Vermont, is eighty-four and losing his faculties. Normally his daughter checks up on him daily, but she has gone down to New York for the weekend, so while she’s away Harry’s only other child, Alan (Craig Bierko), a middle-aged divorcé who sells real estate in San Diego, has agreed to step in. Harry thinks Alan’s visit is simply a matter of seeing the old man, or possibly even a sign that Alan is interested in moving back home. Yet Alan is here to tell Harry that he must leave his cozy nest and move into an assisted-living facility. Few octogenarians want to hear this, but Harry has suffered bad burns on his arms from misadventures at the stove and has developed a habit of falling. “I tripped!,” he insists. “Tripping and falling is not the same as simply falling!” To put it a little differently, “I’m fine when I sit. I’m fine when I stand. I just don’t do transitions very well.” Elegantly put, and very much the kind of rationalization you might hear from an