Closer

Patrick Marber's caustic portrait of love in our time focuses on two intertwined London couples and their struggles to stay together in the face of their own failings: infidelity, obsessive behavior and self destructiveness.  Marber, considered the heir to Pinter and Stoppard, writes in distinctive, post-modern fashion: staccato dialogue, wise-ass humor, minimal exposition, extreme sexual frankness, sketchy character development.  He is also fixated on addiction; his first play, Dealer's Choice, dealt with gambling and booze; Closer gnaws endlessly on the bone of sexual obsession.  Dan (Christopher Evan Welch), a cynical newspaperman (obituaries), falls for Alice (Maggie Gyllenhaal) a street wise stripper.  This happens, though, when Dan also has the hots for Anna (Rebecca De Mornay), an upper-class photographer who is married to Larry (Randle Mell), a successful, up-from-the-ranks doctor.  In La Ronde like fashion, the four of them change allegiances again and again over the course of the next five or six years, fighting to love each other but always failing, largely because of a compulsive need to grill each other: how did the sex go with the other person?  Did you enjoy it more with him?  did you come?  how many times?  They ask for truth and openness, but can't handle it when they get it.  They also taunt and hurt each other mercilessly, only to suffer guilt and regrets when they realize the damage they've done.

Sophomoric, neurotic people that they are, they never learn from their mistakes, only go on repeating them, trapped by a kind of modern gravity resembling Newton's cradle (one of the many symbols in Marber's imagistic play).  Eventually, the heartbreak and betrayal lead to death (an occurrence which happens offstage; Closer is, after all, a British play) but not necessarily to wisdom and maturity.  The enjoyment in Closer comes from its scabrous humor and sexual game-playing, and from its world-class acting and directing.  The original, hard-edged musical score by Karl Fredik Lundeberg and Nathan Birnbaum helps a lot too, but David Jenkins' cold, clinical set feels all wrong for the play.