A marriage coasting along on a smooth sea rarely adds up to enthralling theater. It is a more tumultuous relationship, the more ferocious the better, that grabs the audience.
Playwright Michael Weller did it in 2008 with Fifty Words. It's no surprise, therefore, that in his current play, Side Effects, Hugh and Melinda "Lindy" Metz (Cotter Smith and Joely Richardson), tackle a maelstrom of problems lurking beneath their marriage. Fifty Words told a tale of one disintegrating marriage and now, in the same theater, MCC Theater, brings in a two-hander companion piece with Side Effects.
Hugh is a rigid, hard-working businessman at his faltering family company. He wants to run for political office with a mentor who advises him that his number-one problem for political success is keeping his wife, Lindy, reined in. Lindy is a free-spirited intellectual, a bipolar kaleidoscope of moods and loose cannon when she is off her meds. She feels repressed by her husband's disapproval and the demands of his political campaigning. To rebel, she goes off her mood-stabilizing drugs and picks up an old affair. Hugh, long-suffering, has his own fling. Their unraveling relationship escalates with unrelenting tension and fierceness, and you have to wonder why, and how, they can stand each other.
The characters are sharply delineated, and Joely Richardson ("Nip/Tuck") is captivating as the capricious Lindy. There is not a good guy-bad guy aspect here, but the lithe Richardson as Lindy is eye-catching with her quicksilver switches from depressive to seductress to mercurial wit. She is never satisfied with her life, constantly wants something new and totters of the edge of calamity. She would be impossible to live with, but for an audience, she is fun to watch and often sympathetic.
Cotter Smith (Next Fall) brings a convincing portrayal of the complex, troubled husband to this frustrated twosome. Smith's stolid Hugh cannot match his wife's charisma, humor, or intellect except with anger and thus, he is easier to dislike, especially at the end. Sexually, they are like magnets, even during the heat of fierce anger. It is obvious that there is love for each other and their two teenage sons. The sons are not present in the play, but apparently one is as steady as Hugh, and the other has the spirit of his mother, also problematic for the couple.
David Auburn (author of Proof), directs the play showcasing the couple struggling on their wild, roller-coaster relationship. Beowolf Boritt's set shows a neat-as-a-pin traditional living room, with everything in place, ready to be trashed like the marriage. Costumed by Wade Laboissonniere, Lindy wears hip, casual clothes that would appeal to her character, while her husband is predictably conventional.
Weller's aforementioned previous play, Fifty Words, was about Adam and Jan with their marital problems, including Adam's affair with Lindy Metz. That play ends with Adam's 50 words when he makes a telephone call, and in Side Effects, we hear the other end of that phone call. Seeing both plays together could be an ordeal. In fact, watching only Side Effects, which should stand alone, gets repetitive, and the 90-minute play has tiresome moments. Kudos, however, to Joely Richardson and Cotter Smith for bringing their all, with energy and intuition, to the inevitable spiraling down of yet another destructive duo.
