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Closer stars Bruce Norris as Dan, ensemble member
Gary Cole as Larry and Heidi Mokrycki as Alice.
Photo credit: Michael Brosilow
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Closer
Written by Patrick Marber
Directed by Abigail Deser
July 16, 2000 through August 27, 2000
Steppenwolf Theatre Company
1650 North Halsted Street
Chicago, Illinois 60614
Box office: (312) 335-1650
http://www.steppenwolf.org
"It's a lie," says Alice, Closer's stripper with a heart of gold, at a photography exhibition by her romantic rival, Anna. "It's a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully and all the rich fuckers who appreciate art say it's beautiful because that's what they want to see...the exhibition is reassuring, which makes it a lie, and everyone loves a big fat lie."
Superficially disturbing, secretly reassuring, and a wild success for it. In describing the exhibition, Alice inadvertently describes the effect that Closer, British playwright Patrick Marber's second play, has had on audiences worldwide. Critically acclaimed in London and New York, produced in over 40 countries since its 1997 debut, and currently in its Chicago premiere at the Steppenwolf Theatre, Closer owes its popularity to a combination of the provocative and the banal. The play follows four Londoners prone to selfishness, foul-mouthed sex talk, and sudden cruelties, through a series of couplings and betrayals. But Marber's characters are so emotionally impaired that their failures at love are inevitable; no betrayal is very surprising, no cruelty very cruel. In spite of its titillating exterior, Closer ends in tired commonplaces about the elusiveness of love–fashionable cynicism for mass consumption.
Director Abigail Deser and the abundantly talented cast of the Steppenwolf production seem reluctant to stage so simpleminded a play. They struggle with the script in their attempt to find subtler emotional dynamics, but the result is confusion. Marber's charged dialogue sounds strange in the actors' mouths, the most heated exchanges fall flat, and the reasons for the characters' constant changes of heart are all but inscrutable. However well-intentioned the production's efforts, it lacks even the thrill of an argument gone too far.
Marber's characters inhabit a breathtakingly narrow, unchallenging world. The play's 12 scenes capture moments–often accidental meetings–in which relationships are sparked or snuffed out. Apart from these encounters the characters seem to exist in a vacuum, neither driven by nor conscious of social constraints, familial responsibility, political or financial concerns. Even their immediate physical setting seems to make little impression on the characters, who speak in a hospital lobby the same way they do in a strip club. Their professions, about which they never express strong feelings, invest them in the superficial: Dan (Bruce Norris) is an obituary writer, Alice (Heidi Mokrycki) a stripper, Anna (Lia Mortensen) a photographer, and Larry (Gary Cole) a dermatologist. All live by the manufacture or manipulation of images. The artistic pursuits Dan and Anna engage in seem intentionally superficial as well: Anna photographs strangers in public–faces on which she can project anything she wishes–and Dan readily admits (in one of the play's least believable moments) that the novel he writes is the story of Alice's life, becoming the first fiction writer in the history of literature not to protest that all writing is a reinvention of reality.
The characters' apparent obliviousness to a world outside themselves drives the action of the play, but handicaps the drama. The satisfactions other people have found in work, family, and community are unavailable to the characters in Closer's narrow world; thus they leap at every passing infatuation, sure they've found their only chance at happiness. As soon as the initial thrill is gone, they leap again, driven not by the specific pressures of place and circumstance, of desire versus obligation, but by an overabundance of ease. Such adolescent antics are hard to find compelling. So are the conclusions about love the characters come to–the conclusions of bright adolescents. Men don't love women, they love their ideas of women. Lovers most want those who don't need them. Fucking is not the same thing as making love. Insights worthy of a worldwide sensation? Perhaps not.
The first scene is typical of the play's simpleminded sexual politics, and of the production's unduly gentle (and ultimately toothless) approach. In a hospital lobby Dan waits with Alice, whose leg is cut badly. We learn the two locked eyes across an intersection the moment before Alice stepped into traffic and was hit by a car. She has escaped with only a badly cut leg, and Dan has brought her in for treatment. While they wait for a doctor, Alice pursues him aggressively, demanding details about the accident and rescue in order to create a mock-romantic story of their meeting: "You knight," she says. "You damsel," he answers. She encourages him to prattle on about the intricacies of obituary writing, and seems most excited by its use of euphemism to hide unsavory behavior. "And what would your euphemism be?" she asks him. Dan is clearly intrigued, but doesn't pursue her until the sting of jealousy provokes him. Larry, a doctor, passes through, flirts with Alice, and she seems to respond. Suddenly Dan is ready to skip work and abandon his girlfriend in pursuit of this stranger. When we see them next they've been married a year and he's written a novel about her–though he wastes no time betraying her for a new stranger.
The production's timidity robs the scene of its most basic requirement, sexual tension, which leaves Alice and Dan's exchange so unfocused, meaning is beside the point. Heidi Mokrycki resists the aggression in Alice's pursuit, speaking lascivious advances as though they were polite conversation. Dan tells her how he came to her where she lay in the street with her leg gashed open, and she asks, "Did you notice my legs?" The intention in her words seems unambiguous, but Mokrycki hides behind an odd plastic smile and makes the question sound casual, if not accidental. Bruce Norris's Dan is shy and abashed, but shows no signs of the sort of silent desperation that might let a man overturn his life at a moment's notice for an off-duty stripper. After such a lifeless beginning, how can the relationship between Dan and Alice–or potential threats to it–stir us? Later in the production, scenes that might be the play's most heated confrontations meet a similar fate. At the photography exhibition, Larry gloats over a flirtation with Alice until unleashes all her resentment with the line, "You're..like the cat that got the cream. You can stop licking yourself." Lia Mortensen plays the scene so casually that when Larry responds: "That's the cruelest thing you've ever said to me," we wonder what we missed.
The most successful aspect of the production is the design, which points to possibilities the rest of the production fails to exploit. The sound design, by the prolific Chicago team of Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman, draws a single original instrumental song through the spaces between scenes. The song plays during blackouts, pauses for the scene, then resumes where it left off. The song's first theme, both restless and soothing, that repeats through the first few blackouts. Just when it has lulled us into a comfortable familiarity, it drops into a dark, minor theme. Over the course of the blackouts, the piece makes other transformations, but always returns to the original theme to remind us where we started. The overall effect is to heighten our sensitivity to sudden changes of tone, to prepare us for scenes in which a single line turns a light banter murderous.
Other than a few furniture pieces and props on stage, the set, designed by Nail Patel and lit by James Ingalls, consists of enormous still photographs lowered in on wires to suggest the setting of the scene: a hospital corridor, a busy restaurant, etc. As the play proceeds, various combinations of photos from previous scenes return and hover above the photo of the current setting, suggesting the complexities of memory's effect on present experience. Unfortunately, the production fails to live up to its design. Rarely do the scenes make the sudden, startling shifts the music prepares us for, and still more rarely do we see the characters act with a reflectiveness in which we might discern the play of memory.
In previous productions, several of which Marber himself directed, Closer succeeded in creating a world in which its cruelties were stirring and its purported insights meaningful. Critics praised the play as an anatomy of modern love, reaching hysterical heights of enthusiasm for a one-joke internet sex scene between Dan and Larry early in the play. But Closer confines itself to too narrow a range of lives to be any sort of anatomy. The Steppenwolf production wants us to believe in the play as a love story, to invest ourselves in the fate of the characters' relationships, but the script's stubborn shallowness and the production's own uncertain approach defeat it. The production falls short of Marber's real achievement, which is to make our most insipid insights seem exciting. He has won precisely the popularity which that would seem to bring.
PRODUCTION NOTES:
Set Design: Neil Patel
Costume Design: Virgil Johnson
Lighting Design: James Ingalls
Sound Design: Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman
Dramaturg: Michele Volansky
Voice and Dialect Coach: Linda Gates
Stage Manager: Laura Koch
Assistant Stage Manager: Erin Wenzel
--Stephen Boykewich
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