Modine has a stake in keeping his brother imprisoned. It gives him power and a godlike role in their small world. Finney works artfully, using object lessons, parables, and question-and-answer sessions, feeling his way, talking these kids into a new view of themselves. There is a lot of stage business for him to perform while he talks. He paints, does carpentry, plays with his gun, and watches while Anderson swings from the curtains and tumbles around the set like a monkey in a cage. Modine alternates between aggression and passivity; he takes a strong line at first but eventually confesses his ignorance to the older man.

This sort of material is strong on the stage. You enter the same time and space as the actors, and the lights go down, and they project great energy at the audience, which leaves feeling slightly more dangerous and alive than when it entered the room. It is a very satisfactory experience. Plays such as Lyle Kessler's "Orphans" and Sam Shepard's "True West" (with its suite for pop-up toasters) can be considered as concerts for voices and movement. The playwright supplies the words and suggests the actions, and the actors cry and whisper, leap and crouch, fight and surrender, and reveal great hurts from their pasts. Along the way, it is important, of course, that they change and that they discover some measure of the truth about themselves.

Actually, change and truth are the least important ingredients, because they are the most arbitrary and artificial, put in to make the behavior look like a real play. The actual physical and verbal behavior itself is the subject of the play. It is possible to construct elaborate theories about the meaning of "Orphans," but on the stage, the play works as an exercise in human vitality, in which the actors test their instruments. On screen, where the impact of their actual physical presence is missing, the material is revealed as a series of contrivances.

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