Homo Repair

Photo by Craig Schwartz

Jon Robin Baitz may be a wonderful, erudite writer, with a new play closing this week at an important new venue (Center Theater Group’s Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City). Forgive me, though, if I can’t take that play, The Paris Letter,seriously.

His mystery opens very dramatically. A desperate young man in underwear, Burt (Neil Patrick Harris), begs and kisses and begs again his older lover, Sandy Sonenberg (Ron Rifkin), not to abandon him. Burt has evidently lost a lot of Sandy’s money, and news of the fiscal debacle and Burt’s vapid schemes to recover the funds vex the older man, an investment broker with Holocaust victims for clients. "These people whose lives you’ve trashed — [they’ve fled] pogroms and Nazis only to find that at the end of the American rainbow, there’s you," Sandy chides his forlorn apprentice, as though the investment accounts of Holocaust victims are somehow worth more than the investment accounts of anyone else. Burt then promptly blows his brains out, spraying blood all over a silvery screen behind him — a striking end to Scene 1.

In three acts, by investigating the mystery of Burt’s suicide, Baitz probes Sandy’s fall from grace. For a moment — a very short moment — the play shows the promise of picking up where Caryl Churchill’s Serious Moneyleft off. With the authority of Paul Krugman, Baitz’s characters speak about offshore investments and Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements. Any play about the misery and hope of the 21st century is going to be about international finance, the force with which that misery and hope begins and ends. There is arguably no more immediate theme for a dramatist to embrace. Baitz teases us with dialogue about a macro trader in Boston and of "Japanese distressed securities" and then delivers something much more trite: The nitty-gritty of The Paris Letter,which is set between the ’60s and 2002, concerns Sandy’s closeted homosexuality, and an attempted "cure" for his condition by a renowned Freudian shrink, Dr. Moritz Schiffman, also played by the remarkable Rifkin. Sandy is so confident in the result, he marries a woman (Patricia Wettig), who is equally confident in her husband’s turn to the straight and narrow. Not surprisingly, despite Sandy’s nobly stated and restated love for his wife, his true proclivities seep out. His eventual fling with Burt destroys both men, plus Sandy’s marriage, plus the investments accounts of those Holocaust victims. All because he cheated on his wife and slept with the wrong boy.

Moral of the story: Tear down those closets. See what destruction one man’s sexual repression can wreak on the Upper East Side.

Oh, brother.

If Sandy had been a straight fellow who’d slept with the wrong woman — say, a gold digger who ruined his life — it’s doubtful anyone would confuse this play with a tragedy, despite the corpses littering the stage in Act 3. This is not Fatal Attractionwhere the muse turns vengeful; instead, Baitz’s characters are all so burdened with conscience, the play belongs to another century.

Two plays appeared locally this year that grappled quite beautifully with sexual repression — their effectiveness largely deriving from their lack of Baitz’s pretensions. The Geffen Playhouse presented Richard Greenberg’s comedy Take Me Outat the Brentwood Theater, about a cocky baseball star who one day, nonchalant, announces he’s gay, and the public relations nightmare that ensues. Earlier this year, Ensemble Studio Theater’s L.A. Project put on playwright-performer L. Trey Wilson’s Stage Directionsat [Inside] the Ford. This play was set entirely in a rehearsal hall as two male actors — one gay, one straight — were required to kiss. The straight actor simply couldn’t handle it, so the straight director staged the scene to hide the kiss. After the gay actor and gay playwright went ballistic over how the "truth" had been cheated by the straight men, a war of identities and ideologies unfolded brilliantly.

Baitz’s problem may be his long-standing infatuation with playwright Henrik Ibsen. (Baitz’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gablerwas performed at the Geffen Playhouse in 1999.) Ibsen wrote in the 19th century about the dire consequences of malaise and ethical cowardice in a world fraught with uncertainty. It’s as though in The Paris Letter Baitz has constructed an Olympic-size pool suited for such big themes, and in it he floats his rather small sexual idea like a rubber duck. Baitz then turns red in the face trying to inflate it, to manifest some sense of proportion and magnitude.

We can also probably blame Ibsen that Sandy is so damnably tortured and torn instead of diabolically closeted, like Tony Kushner’s Roy Cohn in Angels in America, wrecking lives around him out of blissful malevolence fueled by repression.

In a flashback, we see Sandy’s initial attraction to Burt stemming from Burt’s Robin Hood economic theories — of milking the finance system to reinvest profits in charities for the disenfranchised. Burt’s ideological benevolence almost brings tears to Sandy’s eyes — that’s how much of a nice guy Sandy is, until he abandons his family for Paris, entering an emotional hermitage. But what century does he think he’s living in? And what century does Baitz think he’s writing about? This is the age of Ken Lay, of Enron execs who fleece friends and neighbors and mock grandmas stuck with exorbitant energy bills. We live in a world run by the descendants of Southern lynch mobs, not soul seekers and noble financiers obsessed with the plight of the poor.