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CLOSER
* Music Box Theatre, New York City * Written and directed by Patrick Marber * Starring Natasha Richardson, Rupert Graves, Anna Friel, and Ciaran Hinds |
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“Tell the truth to the people you want to be closer to.” That’s the sort of advice new-age-y relationship gurus tell the couples they counsel. Patrick Marber’s ironically titled London hit play Closer, which made its American debut on Broadway last month, scrutinizes the shadow side of that proposition. If there’s anything worse than cheating on your mate, it’s confessing all the gory details. “Thank you for your honesty,” snarls Larry (Ciaran Hinds), after his new bride Anna (Natasha Richardson) comes clean about her year-long affair with Dan (Rupert Graves), who’s been married three years to Alice (Anna Friel). “Now fuck off and die, you fucked-up slag!” Whenever the gay singles scene starts to seem like a pathologically depressing cycle of alienated cruising and heartless connections, it’s refreshing to be reminded that, with all of society’s cheerleading on their side, the heterosexuals don’t seem to manage any better. Like The Blue Room, David Hare’s adaptation of La Ronde that revealed Nicole Kidman’s bare butt to Broadway audiences, Closer is another chic, superbly acted but inch-deep yuppie soap opera. The audience experiences a frisson of excitement at recognizing the up-to-date details scattered like brand names throughout the script. The characters have trendy occupations (photographer, dermatologist, stripper, journalist), speak knowingly about the sexual availability of the staff at New York’s Paramount Hotel, and amuse themselves by going online and pretending to be another age or gender or sexual preference. That doesn’t exactly add up to the world’s most satisfying drama, but Closer does hold a shiny if unflattering mirror up to contemporary heterosexual gamesmanship. In a much-talked-about early scene, the two guys meet online in a chat room called London Fuck, only Dan is pretending to be Anna, describing herself as “a cum-hungry bitch” whose ultimate fantasy is to have a line of strangers filling her every orifice. Only a man would try to pass that off as a woman’s fantasy; only a man would believe it. Although the idea of two guys talking dirty to each other via computer may sound kind of homoerotic and hot, what we actually observe onstage comes across as a mixture of cruelty, boredom, and cynicism, which are the predominating flavors of Closer. I couldn’t help thinking of Craig Lucas’s play The Dying Gaul, whose plot pivoted on a similar scene of online sexual masquerade. But in that play, a woman pretended to be the dead lover of her husband’s boyfriend, and Lucas managed to milk the encounter for maximum dramatic and metaphorical impact, portraying cyberspace as a netherworld of disembodied souls. In Closer, watching Rupert Graves type out “i love COCK” just produces a cheap, chilly laugh. The Advocate, May 11, 1999 |
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