Circle Jerks

Erotic roundelays by David Hare and Arthur Miller

A A A Comments (0) By Steven Leigh Morris Wednesday, Mar 27 2002

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Both performers' striking vocal idiosyncrasies -- Von Dohlen's reedy tenor and Field's nasal belt -- overwhelm the multiple characters they're attempting to impersonate. Furthermore, the actors' erotic gestures are too obvious and hackneyed to generate much heat. Von Dohlen's leather-jacketed cabbie, for instance, seems a parody of Eric Bogosian with traces of an English dialect he can't seem to excise; his pompous Playwright is not so much a character as a running commentary on one.

Director David Schweizer may simply be the wrong match for a play of such nuance, given the drift toward opera and the penchant for broad flippancy he's displayed in productions such as The Orestiaand Salome. His production is as sleek and superficial as an evening of sketches at the Groundlings. And that's not the play Hare wrote.

AFTER THE FALL(1964) MARKED MILLER'S RETURN TO the stage after a 10-year absence, and concerns a lawyer, Quentin (Morlan Higgins), who is terrified, after two divorces, of entering into a new relationship with a German woman named Holga (Colleen Quinn). And so, the play slips back into an examination of Quentin's two marriages -- of the friction with his first, harshly critical and possessive wife, Louise (Jacqueline Schultz), and, of course, his infatuation with open wound Maggie (Middendorf), somebody he can save and be adored by. Maggie's insecurity, coupled with her rising fame as a pop singer, transforms her into a maelstrom of jealousy, malice and self-absorption; when she begins to describe her husband's emotional detachment, she sounds a lot like Louise. Such repetitions, and the fact that the play culminates where it started, make After the Falla roundelay of sorts, though without Blue Room's whimsy. Miller studies the barriers between men and women through the tormented soul of one man, rather than through 10 characters' flights of fancy.

The playwright's attempt to connect HUAC, Quentin's near-homicidal rage at Maggie, and the Holocaust strains even the flaccid ligaments of surrealism. But the play is so honest and earnest, and this production so perfectly acted and thoughtfully conceived, it's a must-see, even if it is a curio.