Homo Repair

One can’t not appreciate the caliber of Baitz’s dialogue and the elegant formality of this play’s structure. Act 1 is set in the present, more or less, where characters converse around dining-room and restaurant tables sipping wine. Act 2 tracks the theories of Dr. Schiffman, and his efforts to straighten out Sandy in the ’60s, where characters converse at podiums or around dining-room and restaurant tables sipping bourbon. Act 3 returns to the present, and to the wine. You can pretty much tell where you are in this play by what people are drinking.

I haven’t heard so much dialogue about food since Donald Margulies’ play Dinner With Friends, in which the characters actually prepared the food, so their expertise was enmeshed in their activities. In The Paris Letter, the characters’ culinary expertise is enmeshed in their attitude, which is quite a different brand of authority. It’s also notable how similar The Paris Letteris to Dinner With Friends, both being about the fallout from an infidelity. Margulies, however, understood the scale of that infidelity in proportion to other events of the century.

Doubling as bothSandy and Dr. Schiffman, Ron Rifkin is so charismatic and spontaneous, with a kind of muted insanity, he masks many of the play’s shortcomings. Lawrence Pressman plays his ex-lover, Anton, a fallen angel of sorts who used to run an NYC fashion mag "for a moment" and is now maitre d’ at a Broadway restaurant. Anton also serves as narrator, a duty Pressman fulfills with an appealingly blithe accommodation to the world’s petty tortures, punctuated with little flips of the wrist and small squeals.

When Rifkin morphs into Dr. Schiffman in the Act 2 flashback, Josh Radnor arrives as Young Sandy — having doubled as Sandy’s stepson in the present-tense Act 1. Meanwhile, Neil Patrick Harris, having left his portrayal of Burt in a pool of blood, re-enters as Young Anton. And we watch the young couple dance around each other like butterflies holding shots of bourbon for encouragement. They’re both such Good People, a goodness that will prove to be the play’s undoing. Wettig is lovely as Sandy’s short-suffering wife and Young Sandy’s mother, dealing cheerfully with her son’s obvious bent.

Michael Brown’s arresting Mondrian-like minimalist set design has screens fly in and out, at times revealing peepholes into the backstage — broader perspectives, perhaps? The point of all the design, including Christopher Akerlind’s tightly funneled lights, is to focus on the words. That’s a sound approach in a play largely about language. Director Michael Morris shows such a keen sensitivity to character and cadence, I thought for a moment I was watching CSI: Fire Island.

For Baitz to be taken more seriously, perhaps at this point in his illustrious, tormented playwriting career, he needs to take himself less seriously — knowing the difference between an identity crisis and a tragedy, for instance. Very good plays can come from very small incidents, but knowing what’s big and small is part of the job requirement for an artist. As a great philosopher-muse once noted, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.

THE PARIS LETTER | By JOHN ROBIN BAITZ | Presented by CENTER THEATER GROUP AT THE KIRK DOUGLAS THEATER, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City | Through January 2 | (213) 628-2772