Closer

Closer, which comes to Broadway after deservedly winning the London Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards, is sexier and more provocative than any other new play this season -- British or otherwise -- on Broadway. Under the playwright's own flawless direction, the play deals wittily yet uncompromisingly with the inability of four mature, passionate people to find either permanence or closeness in their intricately interlocked relationships. This is a comedy of manners that matters, as it skillfully dissects a circle of betraying and betrayed lovers.

It is easy to understand why Alice (Anna Friel), a beguiling men's club stripper, falls for and becomes the lover of Dan (Rupert Graves), an insecure writer who used Alice as the subject of his modestly received first book. If Dan's talent ultimately proves more lucrative as the writer of a newspaper's obit page, it initially serves to attract Anna (Natasha Richardson), the cool yet emotionally vulnerable photographer assigned to photograph Alice for the book's cover.

In the mood for perverse diversion, Dan pretends he is Anna as he initiates a hilarious, XXX-rated dialogue on an Internet chat-room with Larry (Ciaran Hinds), a dermatologist with an acute attraction to skin. This scene alone is worth the price of admission.

Through a clever spin of the plot, Larry actually gets to meet and fall in love with Anna. Yes, other combinations occur and recur over heartbreaks and breakups over several years. What keep the characters so intriguing and poignant are their pitiful searches for the kind of fulfilling relationships that are obviously and sadly beyond their capacity to experience. Downward spiraling affairs may not seem like a fun way to spend an evening, but Marber's dialogue is trendy, trenchant, and brutally revealing.

Flawed as they are, the expertly portrayed characters will linger in your thoughts long after the curtain falls.