One of the great dramaturgical cheats is explaining away a piece's illogic -- or incoherence -- by revealing that everything an audience has just seen was actually a dream or some other flight of fancy.

The nighttime television soap Dallas famously labeled its entire 1984-85 season a ``bad dream.'' And in his new work In Development, playwright David Caudle tries a variation, claiming in his play's waning moments that the bizarre goings on that we've been watching for two hours were what happened when the main character went into a ``fugue state.''

Now, if the play, which is getting its world premiere at Coral Gables' New Theatre, were fascinating, funny, intriguing or enlightening up to that point, we might forgive the oh-never-mind cop-out. But it is none of those things.

In Development is, in fact, an inside-baseball play from the world of new play development, one with sexual harassment, blackmail and homoeroticism slathered on top of its improbable story. It takes place at a nondescript summer new-play conference at an unspecified college nestled in some unnamed mountains, though perhaps for context it references the country's most famous such event, the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center.

The prestigious conference, however, is everything Caudle's fictional gathering is not. Presiding over a dozen younger playwrights is one Gideon Flynn (Bill Schwartz), a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who long ago lost the ability to teach anyone much of anything. Flynn is quite good at conjuring vulgar and obscene imagery, making sexually inappropriate remarks and, before drinking himself into a stupor, coming on to students of either gender.

Caudle is a good enough playwright that he injects some laughs and occasional intrigue into In Development, though his observations (via the slimy Gideon) about dramatic structure and the frustrations of trying to get plays produced are unlikely to interest anyone other than a fellow playwright.

Director Ricky J. Martinez and a game cast try to serve Caudle's crazy tale, which comes complete with a ``theater ghost'' named Patrick (Skye Whitcomb), a former Flynn student who apparently committed suicide (or not) after being outed by his plastered teacher. Aubrey Shavonn is the tough Donna, who tries to beat Gideon at his own game, and Mark Della Ventura gives a grounded, funny performance as a student whose name is apparently not important enough for the self-involved Gideon to remember.

Schwartz and Ricardo Rodriguez as a playwright named Nando both go full frontal, the married Gideon giving in to his lust for the handsome younger man. Rodriguez is earnest but still unpolished as an actor, and though Schwartz commits with gusto to every word and deed that Caudle has given Gideon, not even a reincarnated Laurence Olivier could make sense of the ill-conceived In Development.

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.

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