Theatre in Review: The Mystery of Love and Sex (Lincoln Center Theater)At any given moment, you may think you know the people who populate The Mystery of Love and Sex, but I assure you, you don't. The secrets in Bathsheba Doran's play drop as frequently as overripe fruit from a tree in August, forcing you to them repeatedly. At first, this is fun; after a while, it becomes a bit of a chore. Lucinda and Howard, a middle-aged couple, are dining with their daughter, Charlotte, and her boyfriend, Jonny. At least, he appears to be her boyfriend, an impression Charlotte does little to dispel. When Howard asks her if the relationship is serious, Charlotte replies it is, and that, after graduation, they are moving to Washington, DC together. This doesn't stop Howard from slipping the phone number of an available male to Charlotte, nor does it explain the tension between Howard and Jonny. Is it because Jonny is black? How little we know. It turns out that Charlotte and Jonny have been best friends since they were nine. Jonny, a good Baptist, is saving himself for marriage. Charlotte drops the first of an armada of bombshells by announcing that she thinks she is a lesbian. Goaded by Jonny, she makes a call to the girl of her dreams, then, abruptly panicking, turns off her phone. Minutes later, she is throwing herself at Jonny, stripping naked and lying down on the dinner table, while he steals away. A couple of months later, Charlotte is having an emotionally abusive fling with a woman, drinking too much and generally making an embarrassment of herself, to the point that Jonny's new girlfriend wants nothing to do with her. Plagued by an epic hangover, Charlotte comes out to her parents, and Jonny tells her that their friendship is finally over. Another playwright could get two acts out of this alone, but Doran is just getting started. Among other things, Jonny is holding back a big revelation about his sexuality, which won't be disclosed until his mother dies; Howard and Lucinda's marriage is rapidly crumbling; and Howard, a successful crime novelist, will find his oeuvre denounced as racist and sexist in an academic paper written by Jonny, causing all sorts of uproar -- none of which is resolved until the day of Charlotte's wedding to a nice young female doctor. In exploring the confusions of sexual and racial identity and the sometimes stifling nature of family roles, Doran works out her narrative as elegantly as a calculus equation. Each act begins with a seemingly placid dinner in which all sorts of emotions lurk under the surface. Charlotte has a big confession scene played to Jonny and he plays one to her. Charlotte gets naked in front of Jonny, and eventually he strips in front of her. And in the final scene, we finally come to understand the source of the unspoken tension between Jonny and Howard. The revelations are parceled out as meticulously as the clues in one of Howard's thrillers -- but instead of bringing a clarifying honesty to the narrative, this approach sometimes makes The Mystery of Love and Sex seem overplotted and unnecessarily contrived. Watching Doran move her figures around the narrative grid has a diminishing effect; they aren't mysterious creatures at all, just puppets who cry and break down and announce their sexual preferences right on cue. This is especially true of Jonny and Charlotte; despite the characters' protestations, Doran never makes a convincing case for their being soulmates; instead, they seem a case of clashing temperaments and diverging interests. Weirdly, we are expected to believe that a prosperous novelist and his family live -- in a Southern town -- next door to a struggling black single mother and her son. Doran is also hard-pressed to explain how Lucinda, a true Southern belle, defied her prominent family to marry Howard, a Jew from New York, when they seem to have so little in common. These odd couples seem to exist largely so the playwright can play around with various dualities -- Jew and Christian, straight and gay, black and white. If The Mystery of Love and Sex never quite convinces, it certainly goes down easy, thanks to Sam Gold's silken direction and an expert cast. Tony Shalhoub manages to sand the rough edges off of Howard's all-too-abrasive personality, adding some much-needed charm and conviction, whether pontificating to Charlotte, struggling simultaneously with a too-low table and a too-large salad bowl, or lunging in rage at Jonny for his treacherous behavior. Diane Lane is a fount of blunt wisdom, and is especially amusing when, in moments of stress, she indulges in finger-clicking movements that a hypnotist has prescribed for distracting herself from the need for a cigarette. In an evening loaded with true confessions, she pulls off a nifty one when, following a knock-down drag-out father-daughter row, she casually lets slip to Howard that she is sleeping with someone else. Representing the younger generation, Gayle Rankin, last seen slinking around as a tramp for hire in Cabaret, totally nails Charlotte's wildly impulsive nature, playing down her more grating qualities even while making thoroughly clear why, as Jonny says, "You make being your friend a job." Mamoudou Athie, who made such a good impression earlier in the season in Debbie Tucker Green's Generations, is a refreshingly sly presence among this tribe of oversharers; he alone among the cast generates any sense of warmth. The modified thrust configuration of the Mitzi E. Newhouse stage is probably not the ideal space for this sort of naturalistic drama, but it's hard to understand why the set designer, Andrew Lieberman, has backed the playing area with two enormous curtains on which are printed black-and-white negative images of trees. It looks like the setting for a drama about lynching, not a modern comedy of manners. On the plus side, there is an elegant paneled floor and the scene changes move rapidly, an absolute necessity for a play that is arguably too long at two-and-a-half hours. Kaye Voyce's costumes illuminate the characters and the ways they change over the play's five-year time frame. Jane Cox's lighting and Daniel Kluger's sound design (as well as his music) are thoroughly solid. The Mystery of Love and Sex ends with a general reconciliation that, if pleasant to witness, hardly seems earned. But that's the problem that plagues this play: Doran's writing can be engaging when showing how her characters navigate fundamental life changes -- but the changes themselves often don't feel believable. -- David Barbour 
|
