Affairs of the Heartless

Putting aside the eternal appeal of sex and bad language for a moment, the legacy -- and clairvoyance -- of D.H. Lawrence’s once banned 1928 novel, Lady Chatterly‘s Lover, lies in the image of a young, newlywed aristocrat named Clifford returning to Britain from service in the Great War, paralyzed from the waist down and therefore unable to sire descendants (which prompts his father to die “of chagrin”). To compensate for his feelings of, well, paralysis, Clifford becomes a local coal baron, a north-of-England Andrew Carnegie, trundling through the moors in a motorized wheelchair while exuding a haughty disdain for those who shovel the wealth from his mines into his bank account. Clifford’s comparatively class-sensitive adultress-bride, ironically named Constance, may or may not have indulged in her fling with their gameskeeper had her husband been virile, but the fact that he is not serves as one of the most telling emblems of changing sexual identities in the 20th century -- the plight of the superfluous man.

With biotechnologies like in vitro fertilization, and as shifting economic and social mores have resulted in more women entering the workplace, the medieval magnetism that brought together modern knights errant and damsels in distress, then glued them in matrimony out in the ‘burbs, has been losing its grip for decades. The result is what might be best described as no man’s land, in which those of us with a higher center of gravity aren‘t actually needed, biologically or financially. Our emotional value to women, accrued more in mythological than hard currency, may be all we have left in the domestic arena.

Which renders men’s already fragile self-importance something of a mirage and which is why Clifford‘s injury, as a metaphor, is so prophetic. Indeed, the hell of living within marriage -- so eloquently captured by Lawrence in John Vreeke and Mary Machala’s faithful stage adaptation of Lady Chatterly‘s Lover, playing at Pacific Resident Theater -- is now being replaced by the hell of living without it, in the isolation ward of narcissists and neurotics sketched in English playwright Patrick Marber’s latest work, Closer, at the Mark Taper Forum.

Marber‘s Dealer’s Choice, seen at the Taper in 1998 and also directed by Robert Egan, was primarily about cards, gambling and life‘s uncertainties, as told by a playwright whose rimshot dialogue revealed his background as a standup comedian. It was, or at least appeared to be, a better play than Closer, perhaps because it was fueled by a Mamet-like machismo, a directorial timbre at which Egan excels.

Closer -- here on the bounce from London, New York and Chicago -- studies that very machismo, dissecting it in a Schnitzler-like 12-scene La Ronde of two heterosexual couples living in London. (It also follows in the footsteps of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, which takes a pair of spouses and similarly skewers them on a spit of recriminating repartee, effervescent wit and the eternal themes of class, intimacy and deception.) Many of Closer‘s limitations have to do with the writing itself, which draws largely from the soap-operatic, cheap-thrill discovery of infidelity, and somehow fails to distinguish between the truths and truisms of romantic partnerships (more on that shortly). But the production’s drawbacks become evident in the first couple of scenes, when the two principal women, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Rebecca De Mornay, are hung out to dry -- at least compared to their male counterparts, Christopher Evan Welch and Randle Mell. This is not the actresses‘ fault: It’s apparent from their charisma and technique that Gyllenhaal and De Mornay are dynamic performers whose nonetheless inert interpretations have been staged, but not directed. This is particularly striking in a comedy about the ever-shifting emotional intersections where men and women meet.

Tellingly, the strongest scenes in Egan‘s production are between the two men -- dermatologist Larry (Mell), who’s worked his way up from the East End; and obit writerfailed novelist Dan (Welch). One scene, a comedic riff, has the guys seated on opposite sides of the stage at their respective computers, tapping out pornographic missives to each other (broadcast on a suspended screen), as Dan plays the role of his own lover, Anna (De Mornay), a highbrow photographer who shoots lowbrow misery for her posh exhibits. In a cruel comic joke, Dan arranges a liaison between penpal Larry and a fictitious Anna. In a crueler cosmic joke, the real Anna and Larry actually meet, precisely at the location and time Dan had arranged. Within a few weeks, they‘re betrothed.

In an Act 2 scene -- months later, in Larry’s office -- the two men, who still barely know each other, battle over Anna, whom Dan had bedded even while Larry was courting her, then through their marriage and separation. Here forlorn and rejected, Dan has hitherto appeared as the suave philanderer who has spurned the devotion of the damsel he once rescued from a car accident -- waifstripper Alice (Gyllenhaal). Larry, on the other hand, has until now come across as sweetly self-effacing. In this scene, however, the gents‘ qualities are, in a way, inverted, revealing an emotional sweep well harnessed by the actors, from Dan’s fit of weeping to Larry‘s newfound powers of condescension. If the men’s scenes with the women had a similar charge -- of intimacy mingled with cruelty -- this production might have ignited. Instead, one wishes somebody would give these fellows a deck of cards and the script of Dealer‘s Choice.