The Blue Room
What goes on behind closed doors should usually stay behind closed doors. Whether at the Cort Theatre on Broadway or the SOLOCAT Production at The Odyssey Theatre, Sir David Hare’s sex-posé of 10 intimate acts is a dispassionate, voyeuristic survey that leaves its audience wanting.
The irony here is multilateral: its subject matter treated with about as much subtlety as a bad pickup line, its origins based on Arthur Schnitzler’s scandalous play, “Reigen” and, perhaps more importantly, its reception, which a decade later has seen little improvement with this cast. Considered one of “the hottest tickets” on Broadway—to which yours truly got quite an eyeful of Nicole Kidman’s cheeky derriere, surpassed only by Iain Glen’s nude cartwheels across the stage, all the glamour and fleshy couplings were not enough alone to act as a little blue pill to its impotent storyline.
Giving “The Blue Room” a second chance with this production on the west coast without the distracting star power felt like taking a roll in the hay with a past lover—and remembering why it became past. Following a daisy chain of casual lovers driven by lust in an attempt to dispel loneliness and a pervading sense of ennui, the apathetic collisions between Man (Christian Anderson) and Woman (Christina Dow) are so superficially treated that one can find more depth and frankness in the pages of a cheap nudie magazine. At the very least, you’ll get what you pay for.
David Hare’s adaptation of Schnitzler’s turn of the 20th century public service announcement to the Austrians against the growing spread of syphilis may have stayed too true to the source even though there is hardly a comment to disease other than basic hygiene. Not anyone upon leaving this show will need a cold shower and there will be a rash of feigned headaches in this town until it closes…I can think of no better panacea to STD’s than this so avoid taking a date unless you’re having an outbreak.
Considering Hare’s powerful writings (for which he was knighted) concerning the fragile human pathos within relationships and the universal themes of love, death and self-preservation such as “Amy’s View,” (produced around the same time as “The Blue Room”) and “The Judas Kiss,” Hare’s masterful dialogue and rising action is curtailed by the reoccurring transitions between each timed out sex act. Although comical, the stopwatch accuracy of the Man’s stamina ranging from zero minutes to over an hour breaks the continuity until the sight gag exhausts the humor. Between acts, the actors change offstage as the minimal, but clumsy set pieces are rearranged while original music by Arthur Loves Plastic loudly thumps with a woman’s climatic groans ala Nine Inch Nails as Adam Flemming’s projected conceptual images serve as a visual pacifier.
And you almost hope the actors don’t come back. Indeed, they do, and with less than convincing performances. Given the inherit shortcomings in this play it is imperative that the actors at least have some believable chemistry with each other and believe the situations their various, multi-accented characters are thrust in (pun intended). The main problem is that the actors do not listen to each other, do not respond to one another and if the adage is sex sells…no one’s buying it here. The painfully muddied accents exacerbate what appears as a lack of commitment and connection to the roles that demand specificity and a spark of sensuality to be plausible at all. As solo performances, neither Dow nor Anderson fare much better than simply trotting through their parts without much trace of originality or genuine feeling. Both of them seem miscast in these roles and worse yet, they act as if they know it.
Given the intimate space and the lack of physical attraction, director Elina de Santos may have been wise to keep the nudity to an absolute minimum. About the only scintillating thrill here is watching the pair in their skivvies. Sorry to say there aren’t any acrobatic revolutions and no bare bottoms worth sitting through this production. It’s just a bunch of fluff and stuff and much ado about nothing—much like its Broadway predecessor.
If Viagra gets it up, then ironically, “The Blue Room” brings it down.
“The Blue Room”
Runs through May 2
Thurs, Fri, Sat at 8pm
Sundays at 2pm
Odyssey Theatre
2055 Sepulveda Blvd.
Los Angeles, 90025
PH: 310-477-2055
www.plays411.net/blueroom