REVIEWS ...
Monday, June 18, 2001
'Blue Room' leaves little to the imagination
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
David Hare's The Blue Room, a series of 10 hurried or languid sexual liaisons which opened Saturday, is a perfect fit for GableStage and its thrill-seeking artistic director, Joseph Adler. And not just for the most obvious reason, which would be the fearlessness of the play's onstage nudity, male and female, partial and complete.
It's true that Adler, who seems happiest when his audiences are a little shaken and stirred, has no qualms about having actors go the full monty when the edgy contemporary scripts he favors suggest that possibility.
But his production of The Blue Room is both enticing and satisfying for other, richer reasons. Adler and the actors, David Mann and Stephanie McNeil, dig with relish and style into Hare's script, into its exploration of lust and class and the power of sex itself. It's as absorbing and wonderfully realized as anything GableStage has done to date -- and given the theater's high level of achievement, that's saying something.
Hare's contemporary riff on Arthur Schnitzler's once-banned, turn-of-the-century play La Ronde, The Blue Room is an intermissionless 90-minute exploration of all manner of sexual couplings.
It opens with a neophyte hooker named Irene (McNeil) soliciting a cocky Cockney cabbie (Mann), who's having a bad night business-wise, and who's already spent what little money he had on sushi. Affected by his taciturn charm, or maybe by enthusiasm for her new profession, Irene gives him a tumble on credit.
As with every other coupling in the play, we see the two pre- and post-coital; the act itself takes place during a blackout, though its duration (or lack of same) is duly noted in a projection above the stage.
Next, the cabbie gets it on with a skittish French au pair in the storage room of a club. She, in turn, allows herself to be seduced by the jittery student son of the family that employs her, which proves to be an exercise in disappointment and class self-consciousness.
On and on it goes -- the student and a married woman, the woman and her politician-husband, the politician and a coke-snorting model, the model and a self-besotted Irish playwright, the dramatist and the actress he fancies, the actress and a vapid aristocrat, the aristocrat and an older-but-no-wiser Irene. The characters take turns being the seducer and the seduced, the powerful and the vulnerable.
As he does with so many of the actors who work at GableStage, Adler coaxes personal-best work from Mann and McNeil.
Mann, who mingles a hint of Mel Gibson with a whiff of Hugh Grant, is as fearless when his character is a doltish twit (the politician, the aristocrat) as he is when he's playing the playwright, oozing charm in the altogether. And his varied accents are spot-on perfect.
McNeil, who suggests a younger and blonder Jane Alexander (if Alexander had a dancer's lithe body), plays the youthful naivete of the prostitute and the model as convincingly as she evokes the worldliness and manipulative intelligence of the actress and the politician's wife.
The production's design elements rise to the same high level, from Jeff Quinn's set and evocative lighting (he lets us "see" venetian blinds being closed or the sparkling reflection of light on a river) to Daniela Schwimmer's class-underscoring costumes. The actors do their necessarily quick changes on either side of the stage, in full view of the audience, but Quinn's dusky just-enough lighting makes those moments provocative rather than exploitative.
Which is true of GableStage's The Blue Room itself.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
The Blue Room's sexuality is laid bare
By Jack Zink, Theater Critic
Middle-aged males who passed through their sexual coltishness via Penthouse magazine's Forum, and the letters departments of countless other men's magazines, can now add three-dimensional visuals to their aging but never-fading fantasies.
GableStage director Joseph Adler has unzipped the teasing stage hit The Blue Room and made it the soft-core sex romp that London and New York audiences wanted it to be. The 1998 West End/Broadway versions were best known for Nicole Kidman, now the coquette of the film Moulin Rouge, appearing in the buff for a few tantalizing seconds, her back to the audience.
The play itself is like those yellowing copies of Playboy still hidden from mom, stacked in closets everywhere. The Blue Room is not exactly literature. Sex-charged hit status (and nudity) aside, one could rationalize seeing The Blue Room because it's David Hare's freestyled adaptation of the century-old drama La Ronde, Viennese dramatist Arthur Schnitzler's frank examination of the collapse of old-world morality.
Schnitzler's play was considered the stage equivalent of a bodice-ripper in its own day, shut down by Vienna's police in 1921 and the author hounded in court as a pornographer. Even in its modern undress, The Blue Room is tame by some R-rated movie standards. Still, nudity on stage, combined with artfully suggested but never fully simulated sex acts, is a potential turn-on few voyeurs would willingly skip.
The GableStage production is willfully suggestive as only Adler knows how, without being tasteless or (utterly) gratuitous. Adler does pay a price, however. He heightens the play's appeal as stolen pleasure, while revealing how slight is Hare's adaptation. If Schnitzler's La Ronde was commenting on social erosion in 1898, the 1998 of The Blue Room is a fully denuded moral landscape.
Dramatic without having any dramatic arc, The Blue Room offers 10 slice-of-life vignettes, at times suggesting a quest for emotional fulfillment that is seldom achieved.
David Mann and Stephanie McNeil each portray five characters who couple in a daisy chain of sexual assignations. McNeil is at first a neophyte prostitute offering free samples, who connects with Mann as an off-duty cab driver. The cab driver then seduces an au pair at a party. The au pair later encourages the attentions of her employers' son. The rondo continues, involving a politician's wife, then the politician, a model, a playwright, an actress, and finally an aristocrat who leads us back to the prostitute.
Mann and McNeil climb easily up and down the British social ladder via their characters. Hare is noted for his commentary on the social and economic class system, and there are vestiges of it here, mostly in the aftermath of each encounter. There is no afterglow in The Blue Room.
Mann and McNeil are an appealing acting duo, physically fetching but not so glamorous as to make The Blue Room seem an unattainable fantasy. Adler's direction, and Jeff Quinn's scenic and lighting designs, surreptitiously draw us further into the play's erotic zone, keeping it on simmer and never letting it boil.
By the time both actors are fully revealed under bright white light, late on the daisy chain, the exposure is treated like a living portrait; the tease ends without jumping out of the theatrical moment into exhibitionism. That's important, because The Blue Room, though dramatically slight, is undeniably theatrical.
Jack Zink can be reached at jzink@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4706.
