“Loose Ends,” currently being revived at the Second Stage, is Michael Weller’s play about privileged, vacuous, self-absorbed people trying to figure out what to do with their lives and with each other. Paul (Terry Kinney) and Susan (Jane Kaczmarek) meet briefly on a beach in Bali in 1970, have sex, and think about traveling around together. (They decide not to.) Over the next nine years, they meet again, wonder about whether or not to shack up together, shack up, marry, and divorce. During that time, we watch them sit around with various friends and relatives, drinking beer, smoking or not smoking, opening numerous bottles of champagne, and talking about how much they confuse and resent each other. In 1979, Paul, now divorced from Susan, drops in on her unexpectedly. After a bout of sex and a nostalgic session of slide-viewing, Susan leaves to keep a date with another man. The lights go down on Paul, alone in the dark, clicking through a carousel of images from the past.
“Loose Ends,” directed by Irene Lewis, is the second of Mr. Weller’s plays to be revived by the Second Stage this season. In December, New York audiences had a chance to see “Moonchildren,” his bittersweet comedy about a group of college students in the sixties trying to figure out what to do with their lives and with each other. The two productions are part of the Second Stage’s new Artist in Perspective series, in which the theater plans to devote whole seasons to the work of a single playwright. I can’t help wondering why the Second Stage, whose worthy mission has always been to offer a second life to plays that failed their first time around, should suddenly take to reviving plays regardless of their stage history—both “Moonchildren” and “Loose Ends” enjoyed long and successful runs.
Still, there was some sense to reviving “Moonchildren.” It’s a good play, for one thing. Also, it was truly interesting to see from an eighties perspective—partly because of the elements of sixties sensibility that pervade it but more because of the way the play itself transcends those sensibilities, testing them and calling them into question. “Loose Ends” doesn’t transcend its seventies sensibilities; it’s sort of mired in them. As a portrait of contemporary heterosexual relations, it is utterly humorless. Indeed, some of the play’s most dramatic speeches and set pieces approach self-parody—and if Bill Murray and Laraine Newman were delivering Paul’s and Susan’s lines, instead of Mr. Kinney and Miss Kaczmarek, we’d all be rolling in the aisles.
Kevin Rupnik’s set consists mostly of Bauhaus chairs and a system of ugly gray paneling through which we sometimes catch glimpses of a Balinese moon, a park-bench scene, or an unfurnished apartment. The disjointed, metonymic image with which it establishes a setting are vaguely reminiscent of snapshots or transparencies—like the arty photographs that Susan manages to sell to galleries or the slides that Paul is sifting through at the end of the play. Mr. Rupnik may have been trying to pick up on the photography motif; but the design is somewhat too cerebral in its cleverness—the exterior scenes fail to create a sense of place, while the interior ones have the feel of a doctor’s waiting room. The only bright spots of the evening are provided by the supporting players: Park Overall, who does her funny, tough-talking bit as the perpetually pregnant Maraya: Alexandra Gersten as Susan’s ashram-hopping friend Janice; Bill Kux as Janice’s complacent guru; and Paul Guilefoyle as Paul’s brother, Ben.
A more interesting portrait of contemporary marriage is to be found in “Cave Life,” a new play by David Steven Rappaport, which opened last week at the Circle Rep. The heroine, Charleston Silvers (Robin Bartlett), is haunted by a caveman called Enki (Bruce McCarty), whom no one else can see. A man of simple wants and few words, Enki lives with Charly, talks to her, helps her with the laundry and with decisions, and lusts after her with an inarticulate eloquence that she finds irresistible. Charly’s hallucination, however, is more than an expression of her dissatisfaction with her marriage to Frank (Mark Blum). Charly is crazy; in fact, she has always been unbalanced, a circumstance that seems not to have worried her until comparatively recently. Now that she is pregnant, though, her fear is that she will prove unfit to care for the baby, which she wants very much to have.
A poetic depiction of contemporary malaise, “Cave Life” is a play about what one character—Frank’s European mistress (Randy Danson)—calls “the geography of good intentions,” and, expertly directed by Paul Lazarus, it is poignant, amusing, and very good theater. As the principals in the metaphysical ménage á trois, Miss Bartlett, Mr. Blum, and Mr. McCarty give complex and funny performances. There is an excellent supporting cast, led by Jo Henderson, who has a wonderfully daft ordinariness as Charly’s dangerously lunatic mother, and Jeffrey Kearney, who doubles as Frank’s brain-damaged son and an unusually appealing religious fanatic. The production is full of aural and visual cleverness: the way the music (a Fred Astaire song someone is dancing to, a Talking Heads song played between scenes) comments on the action of the play; the way venetian blinds—masking a scene change or in a psychiatric clinic or in an illicit trysting place—link the themes of theater, madness, and amoral behavior; the way the creviced boulder at the back of William Barclay’s set could be a reference to the play’s title or to the rock you pass on Central Park West walking south from the Museum of Natural History. Cleverest is the use that Mr. Rappaport makes of his heroine’s hallucination. Another playwright might have offered the caveman fantasy as a metaphor of a sane woman’s dissatisfaction with her life and marriage. By making Enki a figment of Charly’s mental instability, he transforms madness itself into a metaphor for the sane man or woman’s way of dealing with disappointment.
Which is, of course, what “Loose Ends” is all about; in a sense, “Cave Life” is an updated, more theatrical version of the Weller play. Both are about unhappy marriages; both are intent on probing the gap between expectation–what one thought one would get out of life–and an unsatisfying reality. Even the personal issues raised in the two plays–whether one should be unfaithful, whether one should have the baby–are the same. The unhappy marriage in Mr. Weller’s play is a theatrical dead end: it goes nowhere and has nothing to say about the phenomenon it portrays except that it exists. The particular truths that “Cave Life” arrives at–that a neurotic’s symptoms are the dearest thing in the world to him or her, that “crazy people are more self-centered than they are crazy,” that people who live with an albatross generally like it–are not unfamiliar, but the play is stage-worthy in a way that “Loose Ends” really isn’t. “Loose Ends” has no real reason to be a play. As theater, it is wildly uneconomical: it requires eleven actors (three of whom appear in only one scene) and takes us to Boston, Manhattan, upstate New York, New Hampshire, and as far as the Indian Ocean to make a point that could be articulated in a single sentence. “Cave Life” is theatrical in a formal sense: in the way it uses its central image–the hallucination–to suggest more about its subject than could be expressed only with words.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, February 22, 1988