November 19, 1993

DON'T be too quick to groan over the news that there is yet another play in New York about an unhappy family drowning in disillusionment. In "The Loman Family Picnic," a deceptively sketchy portrait of an uncomfortably married Jewish couple and their two young sons in Brooklyn in 1965, Donald Margulies has taken material as stale as yesterday's bagel and woven it into a phantasmagorical comedy of both lacerating humor and infinite compassion. Though the play is more of an embroidered conceit than a cogently worked out drama (as Mr. Margulies provided in last year's "Sight Unseen"), it generates its own enduring resonance as a study in the wistful, self-conscious fantasies that emerge from mundane lives. And bolstered by two impeccable central performances, this production finds a tone of bizarrely heightened naturalism that can accommodate both the play's deliberate banality and its high-flying whimsy.

Victor Gotbaum resigned from the New York City Board of Education yesterday at the request of Mayor David N. Dinkins so that the Mayor -- and not his successor, Rudolph W. Giuliani -- could appoint a replacement to serve out the last six months of the term. The maneuvering was the latest sign of an increasingly contentious transition between the outgoing Dinkins administration and the Giuliani team after an abbreviated honeymoon that had seemed to signal a graceful changing of the guard.

The House of Representatives today approved the most significant changes since the era of wagon trains in the law controlling mining on hundreds of millions of acres of public land in the West. The bill, which passed by a vote of 316 to 108, would eliminate the ability of mining companies to take title to valuable Federal lands containing gold, silver and other "hard rock" minerals for just a few dollars an acre.

Andrea Schlesinger was explaining to a group of high school students last week the results of a survey she conducted to gauge student familiarity with the New York City Board of Education. "We didn't do too well," said Ms. Schlesinger, who is a 17-year-old senior at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn and the Board of Education's student representative.

Pollution and Civil Rights Opening new avenues of environmental law, the Government agreed to investigate industrial pollution as a matter of civil rights. Page A16. New Approach on Schools An executive who specializes in cutting costs to salvage floundering businesses was named to head California's public school system. Page A16. Recruiters Barred at Campus A New York judge ruled that a state law school must ban military recruiters because the Pentagon discriminates against homosexuals. Page B5.