January 24–31, 2002

theater

No Cigar

Closer

Runs through March 3,
Arden Theatre Company, 40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122, www.ardentheatre.org

At the Arden, notice is posted of Closer’s unsuitability for persons under 18. Pay no attention: The sexual fantasy sequences responsible for most of the play’s notoriety could hardly interest anyone beyond adolescent boys. Closer (from which one can’t get far enough away) means to be hard-hitting and sophisticated, but it’s neither.

Here’s the setup: In contemporary London, Dan, an obituary writer, hooks up with Alice, a nymphet whose leg has been injured in a car accident. He also begins an affair with Anna, a photographer taking the book-jacket portrait for a novel Dan has written — which is based on Alice. Apparently, Dan gets off on stealing women’s inner lives: Later he impersonates Anna in an online sex conversation with a doctor (Larry), who, by amazing coincidence, treated Alice’s wounded knee two scenes before. (Are there only four people living in the whole of London?) From here the characters pair off variously in a sequence of relationships that are crippled by immaturity and sexual incompatibilities.

Closer, which is nothing if not pretentious, wants to evoke all the following: How far people’s often brutal fantasies are from their polished exteriors; how hard it is to make personal connections in today’s world; how sad and needy everyone really is. It also misogynistically poses as a contemporary Lulu, with Alice embodying The Destructive Female Force.

But playwright Patrick Marber has nothing interesting to say about any of this, and the limitations of both his insight and his skills are immediately apparent. Notice the preponderance of two-person conversations — as soon as a third character arrives, Marber banishes one of them. He wants you to believe this supports the play’s theme, but it’s actually because three characters constitute more (you should forgive the expression) balls in the air than Marber’s meager command of craft can sustain. Ultimately, what offends far more than Closer’s puerile attempts to shock ("how does her cunt taste?" is representative) is its shallowness.

Aaron Posner’s direction offers neat choreography but little else. Patrick Brinker (Larry) is excellent; the other three actors are iffier with both accents and emotional connectedness. Still, their contribution is better than Closer deserves (which is as faint as praise gets). The triumph of the production is David P. Gordon’s set, a magical web of frames and faces, constantly revealing interesting new pictures and unfailingly more nuanced than everything set in front of it.

—David Anthony Fox