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Sex with Strangers

Chicago – “Sex with Strangers” is a conventional male-female romantic story brought into the Social Network age. The two-hander starring Stephen Louis Grush and Sally Murphy is playing at the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre. It’s the work of Laura Eason, a former Chicago actress and writer with close ties to the Lookingglass Theatre now living in New York City and trying to make it as a playwright in the Big Apple.

        “Sex with Strangers” opens on a wintry day in a bed and breakfast in Michigan. Olivia, a 30-something writer, is working on a manuscript when a brash young man named Ethan knocks on the door, talks his way into the living room, and after several abrasive exchanges of dialogue, has sex with the woman.

        After this improbable whirlwind beginning, the play fills in the back stories of the two characters. Ethan is 24 years old and a highly successful blogger, making the New York Times online best seller list for months with a serialized book called “Sex with Strangers,” a presumably nonfiction account graphically detailing how he slept with almost 100 women. Ethan is a superstar in the blogger world while Olivia struggles with her self confidence and self esteem trying to rekindle her career as a writer after the success of a single book. The book is now out of print and Olivia is without a publisher and agent. Ethan is on the ascending curve toward fame and fortune while Olivia wallows at the bottom, paralyzed by insecurity from even showing her new book to a possible publisher.

        Under Ethan’s prodding, Olivia finally submits her book to an agent and, low and behold, she strikes gold, a contract with a prestigious publishing house to publish her book electronically and a movie deal in the works. But Olivia’s success shifts the balance of power with Ethan and hard words are exchanged, leading to estrangement. The play’s final moment shows Olivia standing at her open apartment door, agonizing over whether to join Ethan or cut him off completely and marrying another man. If this gives away too much of the storyline, so be it. The love affair is the least interesting aspect of the play.

        “Sex with Strangers” (the title of Ethan’s blogged book) is at its best exploring the culture of electronic networking. Olivia plays by old fashioned rules, which don’t apply to Ethan’s free-wheeling world. He freely admits he fabricated much of the material in his autobiographical book, and even wrote some of the critically enthusiastic blurbs himself. There isn’t much moral high ground in Ethan’s blogging world, and not many social graces either. He can’t hold a conversation with Olivia without dividing his attention with his continuously active handheld email device.

        Olivia is appalled by how Ethan exploits his female subjects in “Sex with Strangers,” while Ethan points out the women were volunteers and even wrote about their seduction in their own blogs. It’s a strange worldview that Olivia can’t understand or accept. She laments the over-proliferation of information that allows an individual to access mountains of facts about another individual before a first date, though many of those facts may be falsified. Olivia yearns for the days when a male and a female met without prior knowledge of each other, developing a rapport at their own pace of discovery.

        Audience members in their early and mid 20’s will recognize Ethan’s communications universe as their own. Many older folks may shake their collective heads at the way the Internet has changed society, both in technology and in the way people view each other. What took a certain measure of time a few years ago can be accomplished in an electronic instant today. The images of people twittering and Facebooking and emailing and talking continuously on cell phones are part of the social atmosphere we breathe.

        Grush is an actor with a strong physical presence. He is built like a small linebacker and radiates physical confidence. His Ethan may not have impressive intellectual skills but he is royalty in the society of the blogger, a sense of empowerment and entitlement Grush projects with easy authority. Grush’s Ethan also has the animal sexual attraction to sweep a vulnerable woman like Olivia off her feet. I suspect there is a Stanley Kowalski role in Grush’s future, a performance that will be well worth seeing.

        Murphy nicely delineates Olivia’s blossoming from the withdrawn and angst ridden woman of the first scenes into a liberated individual who finds success within her reach and won’t let it escape, no matter how much her lover admonishes her. I hope Olivia rejects Ethan for good. He won’t ever let her be her own woman and I doubt Ethan is a one-woman man anyhow.

        The play is performed within Todd Rosenthal’s two highly detailed interior sets. Ana Kuzmanic designed the costumes (which do not flatter Olivia). J.R. Lederle designed the lighting and Andre Pluess and Kevin O’Donnell the sound and original music. Jessica Thebus directs unobtrusively, allowing the action and issues to unfold realistically in a cluster of short scenes.     

“Sex with Strangers” runs through May 15 at the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, 1650 North Halsted Street. Most performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 and Saturday and Sunday at 3 and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday matinees will be added in April and May. Tickets are $20 to $73. Call 312 335 1650 or visit www.steppenwolf.org.

                    The show gets a rating of three stars.     January 2011

                                  Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

          McCraney is an African American and his plays deal with black characters (a white man plays a small role in “In the Fred and Brown Water”). The plays have no obvious social agenda, instead exploring themes of love, loss, and identity in a personal manner.

          The three plays vary in tone, though they share major theatrical and dramatic elements. In all three plays the characters speak the stage directions directly to the audience, initially a distraction that the spectators quickly accept as part of the fabric of the plays, an extension of the dialogue. There are mythic components to the plays, especially in the longer work. Characters have names from the Yoruba people of Africa. There is ritualistic dancing, and choral music that alternates between African percussion and tribal chants and African American spirituals.

          “In the Red and Brown Water” is the most imaginative and poetic play in the cycle, portraying the emotional turbulence within a young woman named Oya who longs for a baby she cannot conceive. Two local men compete for her affections but she ends up isolated in her own dream world. “The Brothers Size” is the most realistic, a three-hander involving two brothers, one just paroled from jail, and a third man who is the parolee’s best friend also just released from jail.

          The final play focuses on Marcus, a 16-year old boy, the son of two characters from the previous plays. Marcus wonders about his sexual identity (he senses that he is gay), an issue that preoccupies everyone around the lad.

          McCraney writes in a distinctive voice that is especially striking in a dramatist so young. His language bursts with passion and eloquence, and even with some humor in the “Marcus” play. It’s impossible to assess how much of the success of “The Brother/Sister Plays” resides in the skill of the playwright and how much with the remarkable acting and staging at the Steppenwolf. McCraney’s way with words and character creation is impressive, but the nine-member Steppenwolf ensemble under Tina Landau’s endlessly insightful directing makes every scene golden.

          The three plays are performed on a large rough-hewn platform stage, framed by a backdrop that reinforces the backwoods atmosphere of the locale. There are sound effects and dramatic lighting and some projections but little scenery. This is an actor's play and they come at the audience from the stage and up and down the aisles.

          The cycle’s tone shifts from naturalism to fantasy (dreams play a large part in the narrative). There isn’t so much a coherent plot as a sequence of storytelling episodes that stake out defining moments in the lives of the central characters.

          Audiences can see the plays in two separate showings, the longer play and the two one-acters, or the cycle is available in one day and night marathon on weekends, with the matinee and evening showings separated by a dinner break. Viewers can attend the plays as stand-alone dramas in any order, though in the narrative chronology “In the Red and Brown Water” comes first, followed by “The Brothers Size” and “Marcus.”

          The plays should probably be seen in the day/night set that allows the spectator to enjoy the rhythms of the action and dialogue and relate to the characters without interruption. The plays do run a cumulative four hours and the concluding “Marcus” is too long for its slender premise, likely testing the viewer’s attention span at the end of the evening.

          But one way or the other, these plays need to be seen, partly to witness the talent of an emerging new presence on the drama scene. But as just as vital is the opportunity to enjoy the wondrous production, delivered with such credibility and authority that the plays appear to emerge spontaneously before the audience in the only form they could possibly assume.

          In alphabetical order, the ensemble consists of Alena Arenas, Phillip James Brannon, Roderick Covington, Glenn Davis, K. Todd Freeman, Ora Jones, Jeff Parker, Tamberla Perry, and Jacqueline Williams. Some of these names should be familiar to local audiences, especially Freeman, Jones, and Williams, but they all soar in their acting, singing, and dancing, like they were born to star in their roles.

          The flawless physical production has been created by James Schuette (set and costumes), Scott Zielinski (lighting), and Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen (sound).

          “The Brother/Sister Plays” run in repertoire through May 23 at the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, 1650 North Halsted Street. Most performances are Tuesday through Sunday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $70. Call 312 335 1650 or visit www.steppenwolf.org.

          The cycle gets a rating of four stars.          January 2010

        “Art” displays three self-absorbed male characters. The action rotates among their three apartments somewhere in France over an indeterminate period of time. Serge, Marc, and Ivan have been friends for many years. Now that friendship could be fractured because Serge has purchased a painting by a trendy contemporary artist named Antrios for the extravagant price 200,000 francs.  The painting is 5 feet by 4 feet and consists of an abstract all-white surface with a few barely discernable diagonal lines.

        Marc is appalled by Serge’s acquisition, dismissing it with an explicit four-letter word. Marc has been Serge’s mentor for years in matters of taste and culture and he considers the purchase of a painting he considers artistically worthless a betrayal of their friendship.

        Caught in the crossfire between Marc and Serge is Ivan, a hyper-emotional and wishy-washy man with his own personal problems revolving around his troublesome upcoming marriage, which both Marc and Serge insist he should cancel. Serge and Marc go round and round for most of the 80 minutes of playing time, trading insults and accusations, at one time coming to blows with the defenseless Ivan caught in the middle.

        As the men argue, recriminations escalate in virulence. Serge attacks Marc’s wife as mannered and affected. Both hammer poor Ivan. The all-white painting becomes a bone of contention that could destroy a friendship that obviously means much to all three men.

        The play raises aesthetic issues that aren’t new but still worth pondering. The Antrios painting mirrors the minimalist style of numerous twentieth century artists who created monochromatic pictures that some viewers consider a hoax and others rank as masterpieces. So who is to say what is good art and what is trash? Is the difference solely in the eye of the beholder? Yet there must be some standard to measure quality but who sets those standards?

        These questions are framed by a script of exceptional wit and zest. The play was written in French by Yasmina Reza. How much of the success of “Art” goes to her and how much to translator Christopher Hampton, himself a major English playwright, I cannot say. In any case, this is my third viewing of “Art” and each time I came away impressed with the droll and pungent dialogue and the issues it raises about art and the nature of friendship.

        ‘Art” has been installed at the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, which provides the proper level of intimacy. Antje Ellermann designed the basically white-on-white set, the location from apartment to apartment changed by the swiveling and sliding of rear panels. Robert Christen’s lighting bathes the production in a complimentary off white glow.

        The current cast consists of Francis Guinan as Marc, John Procaccino (who was a standby in the original Broadway production) as Serge, and K. Todd Freeman as Ivan. Later in the run Guinan takes the role of Serge and Ian Barford plays Marc with Joe Dempsey replacing Freeman as Ivan.

        Guinan dominates “Art” as the caustic, pompous Marc, but Pracaccino and Freeman both hold up their sides of the triangle. The characters may be too egotistical and narcissistic to be worth knowing in real life, but for 80 minutes they make entertaining and stimulating company.

        “Art” runs through June 7 at the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, 1650 North Halsted Street. Performances are Tuesday through Sunday with variable curtain times. Tickets are $20 to $70. Call 312 335 1650 or visit www.steppenwolf.org.

       The show gets a rating of 3½ stars.      February 2009