The sparse set of senior Danya Taymor’s production of Patrick Marber’s play Closer is filled by the unstable emotions of four fiercely enacted characters. In a hospital waiting room suggested by merely a doctor and a bench, Dan (Jamie Kaye-Phillips) banters sexily with Alice (Alexandra Young) after witnessing her serendipitous accident. Dan is a dangerously charming failed novelist with the all too recognizable combination of inflated self-importance and thinly veiled self-loathing.
But that’s revealed slowly. This, as Dan puts it, is the moment of their lives. His charm is ignited by a sassy, control-wielding minx so magnetic that even the doctor (Vinny Rey), initially too busy to see her, does a convincing double take as he stalks by in his white coat. In a loaded moment, the sexual tension between Alice and Dan spills over uncomfortably to include the doctor as he kneels in front of her and studies her injured leg.
If a similar instance existed in the 2004 movie, it was unmemorable. In Taymor’s version, it’s a unique moment of peculiar lucidity, a moment to pause and observe the inappropriate sexual tension as it escapes containment. It will run rampant through the rest of the play, engulfing not only the doctor but another woman, Chelsea Laverack’s Anna, in a head-spinning plot of twisted merry-go-round love, fast-paced repartee and insults and emotions thrown like darts.
The doctor’s character, written as a likable dupe of a good guy, is saved by Rey’s contemporary and authentic personality and his sense of humor, much needed in this grim affair. As the four characters bait-and-switch one another’s partners, the viewer hopes Anna—first depicted as a collected, mature photographer in pumps at an art opening—will settle on the doctor, calming the characters’ wanderlust into love.
That hope is lost during a particularly realistic fight scene between the doctor and Anna, in which their flirtatious controlled personas ride escalating momentum into anger. Still in her pumps, Anna, spittle-spewing and jaw-clenched, exposes a damaged underbelly to rival the injured neediness Alice displays in her own eventual breakdown.
The gilded moments in which these characters fall in love are microcosms of the personalities they’ve crafted to captivate one another. Their constructions are brilliant but impossible to maintain and their relationships dull to worshipping memories as if they were idols, as they discard the dirty complexities of the people in front of them.
Closer will run in Brody Theater March 25- 27 at 8 p.m. Admission is free.
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