LOS ANGELES TIMES
April 5, 2004
by Rob Kendt
His characters may cheat, but playwright Michael Weller doesn't.
In depicting the one-night stand of two middle-aged adulterers
with a past and, just possibly, a future in "What the Night Is For,"
Weller does due diligence, constructing the sort of gentle but sturdy
two-hander that effaces its fine craftsmanship as it hums along.
They're married, but not to each other, to quote the sage Barbara
Mandrell.
We meet architect Adam (Kip Gilman) and teacher Melinda (Claudia
Christian) mid-reminiscence, catching up rather self-consciously after a decade
apart, over dinner--a room service meal in her hotel room, complete with
champagne flutes.
This can lead to only one thing, of course, but not before these
former lovers tease out some telling details and, in the well-observed
give-and-take at which Weller excels, pointedly peel away the politesse before
peeling off their business clothes.
"Is the goofy gift for old times' sake?" Adam asks about
a collapsing plastic cow she gives him as a coy invitation to tip her, too.
"Or is it more a present-tense kind of deal?"
"Yes," she replies with gathering confidence.
It's here that Christian's performance as Melinda--affectionately,
"Lindy"--begins to emerge as the sultry star turn that it is, with
invitingly dusky shades that recall Kathleen Turner in full feline predator
mode.
This formidable feminine grit, composed of equal parts tempest and
tundra, is Lindy's only defense against taking her life personally, least of
all the failure of her marriage to an unfeeling Midwestern businessman.
Naturally this facade is built only to crumble, in a second-act
scene that veers close to Tennessee Williams' ZIP Code.
Here Christian's rueful faded-belle routine seems especially apt;
she could be Maggie the Cat after a few years with Brick and a few days without
her meds.
In a reversal that pegs Weller as a writer formed by the 1970s, it
is Adam who's the more touchy-feely, sensitive partner.
He's the first one to call Lindy's bluff and demand more from the
relationship, while she resists, though there is more reversal and resistance
in store.
This is the kind of play in which characters call each other out
with the sure-fire challenge, "What are you so afraid of?"
Though, true to the genre, Gilman ultimately gives in to Alan
Alda-esque special pleading--that unmistakable gesticulating nerviness that
says, "Now I'm really telling you how I feel"--he otherwise gives a
sly, searching performance, squinting as if to peer through Lindy's defenses,
equivocating with authentic ambivalence.
Director Richard Stein masterfully guides his performers through
the stop-start, yes-but rhythms of Weller's dialogue, in Laguna Playhouse's
handsome American premiere production. (The show's original London run in 2002
is best known as TV star Gillian Anderson's West End debut.)
Designer Dwight Richard Odle's hotel room walls look like crumpled
sheets rendered in papier-mache; behind this realistic set looms a wall of
Louise Nevelson-style assemblages, perhaps meant to evoke the New York
provenance of the couple's original affair.
Like this portentous set piece, it's the past that overtakes
"What the Night Is For." As in Weller's signature works, "Moon
Children" and "Loose Ends," which bookended the '70s with
pulse-taking portraits of the era's morphing mores, he dramatizes our fear of
the zero-sum game: This choice means not that choice, this road travels ever
further from that door.
And if there's a certain romantic wish fulfillment in the notion
of middle-aged paramours struggling back to a door they thought they'd slammed
shut years before, to his credit Weller remains both sympathetic to his lovers'
emotional confusion and clear-eyed about their blind spots, which not even
passion and goodwill can patch.
"I'm in the wrong life," Adam says at one point--a
recognizable lament, not a soluble problem.
At its best, "What the Night Is For" brings to mind
David Hare's "Skylight," another after-hours accounting of an
infidelity's aftershocks that has a quality of inevitability and emotional
danger and which manages to conjure the rough, unforgiving world outside.
Finally, though, Weller's even-handed, even-tempered play feels as
confined to this one room, and this one night, as this affair is likely to be.
*
'What the Night Is For'
Where: Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach
When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays to Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7
p.m. Sundays. Ends May 2.
Cost: $45 to $52
Running time: 2 hours
Contact: (949) 497-2787