January 31, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Hare shines in play about sexual relationships at Mt. Airy theater
by HUGH HUNTER

The two actors who each play multiple characters in this play at Allens Lane Theater are husband and wife, Christopher M. Bohan and Kristie J. Lang, who carry out a series of 10 sexy vignettes. For more information, visit www.allenslane.org or call 215-248-0546 ext. 1.

Allens Lane Theater in West Mt. Airy invites you to “explore your voyeuristic side” with The Blue Room by David Hare. The play involves a chain of 10 sexual relations in which each new affair reprises one member of the previous tryst. It begins with The Girl (street walker) and The Cab Driver, and comes full circle with The Aristocrat and the same Girl.

Two actors each take on five roles in a fast-paced work that plays without intermission. Kristie J. Lang handles each of her characters with aplomb  — The Girl, The Au Pair, The Actress ... Her playmate, Christopher M. Bohan, does his best acting as The Playwright, a delightfully foppish figure.

Park some of your voyeuristic side at the curb. The stage is always dark and silent at the moment of truth. An overhead screen comically alludes to amorous goings-on by flashing a number of minutes.  Lights soon return for the post-coital chat, where manipulation competes with prurient curiosity, self-deception and genuine unhappiness.

The Blue Room is Hare’s adaption of Der Reigen (1903) by Arthur Schnitzler, a closet drama too racy for old Vienna. Like his good friend, Sigmund Freud, Schnitzler thought the ruling class intuitively believed sexuality was subversive. In Der Reigen, the characters represnt “class positions,” and the chain works its way up from the lower depths to Hapsburg aristocracy.

But the Viennese world that gave Der Reigen its scandalous force no longer exists. As director Kate Galvin explains, when staged today the play can become “just a series of vignettes.” Her solution is to focus attention on the play’s one married couple — The Politician and The Married Woman. She envisions a drama where “...each rendezvous could be a fantasy or a nightmare for this unhappy couple...”

This is a stretch. Appended opening and closing scenes show the married couple lying mutely in separate beds. But I never got the sense that the meat of the play was a projection of their imagination, and the bookend scenes just flap in the breeze.

But Galvin does some other things. She lets assistant stage managers Alexander Jordan and Emily Cheney buzz all over the set, rearranging furniture for the next fling. Their playful and enduring relationship comes to feel like a mimetic Greek chorus, as they engage the actors with fleeting looks — smiling, puzzled, censorious — or stand stage-side like stoic sentries.

I was not expecting to like The Blue Room, but I did. The originating play is both ideological and dated, but the adaptation held my attention — at times poignant, always ironic.