As They Tussle, These Lovers Let Words Fly

It has been quoted widely for good reason; it’s the best bit in Patrick Marber’s 1997 “Closer,” now in its Southern California debut at the Mark Taper Forum. Here is Anna, talking to her sometime friend and constant rival Alice about men and emotional baggage:

”. . . we arrive with our baggage and for a while they’re brilliant, they’re baggage handlers. We say, ‘Where’s your baggage?’ They deny all knowledge of it, they’re in love, they have none. Then, just as you’re relaxing, a great big juggernaut arrives . . . with their baggage. It got held up.”

Anyone capable of that sort of pith and zing is a real playwright. In his debut stage effort “Dealer’s Choice” (seen earlier at the Taper) as well as in “Closer,” Marber displays the killer instinct of a stand-up comic (which Marber was) and a rueful, satirically astute writer for English radio and television (which he became).

But by the end of this roundelay, heavy on the bitters, you may feel like you really haven’t been anywhere.

Stripper Alice (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a self-described “waif,” gets hit by a cab and suffers a minor scrape. She’s taken to the hospital by newspaper obituary writer Dan (Christopher Evan Welch). They flirt. She is availability incarnate. A passing dermatologist, Larry (Randle Mell), takes a quick look at Anna’s bruised leg, notices a question-mark-shaped scar a little further up, and then leaves.

Dan and Alice fall in together. Sometime later Dan has his book-jacket portrait taken by photographer Anna (Rebecca De Mornay). Dan is smitten, ardent in his removed way. Eventually Dr. Larry gets involved (by way of a cybersex chat-room prank played by Dan) with Anna.

All four couple and uncouple and re-couple, as if London had no other prospects for the taking. The brutalities involved--Marber takes for granted the unholy power of sexual jealousy--leave three of the four characters wondering what happened, puzzling over the mystery at the core of the fourth.

Marber doesn’t go soft on his hurting, hurtful souls, and in Larry particularly, he’s applying the spirit of Jacobean revenge tragedy to contemporary times. (Same thing, he might argue.) Yet “Closer” finally lacks something, despite its precision and craft. I don’t mean “heart,” or rooting interests, or interrelational warmth; in this emotional context, facile deployment of such things would be like melted cheese on a brick. Indebted to Harold Pinter and David Mamet, Marber compresses each exchange so tightly, it practically squeaks. For every truthful, painful passage, there’s another that plays like science fiction.

Director Robert Egan’s production is a similarly half-and-half affair, the men far more successfully cast than the women. This wasn’t the case with Marber’s own staging on Broadway, featuring the exquisite Natasha Richardson and Anna Friel waging terrific battle with Rupert Graves and Ciaran Hinds.

Here it’s more like four soloists. De Mornay isn’t bad as Anna, but she seems to be shouting everything, and both emotionally and physically the performance isn’t yet fluid. It’s effortful. Gyllenhaal’s Alice feels effortful in a different way--all too conscious of her effects, though likewise heavy on the braying. (It’s not that big a theater.)

As Dan, Welch infuses the play with a weird, inspired jolt of comedy. He’s a terrific actor, and while at times his fervency carries an unwanted parodic edge, he’s very astute in investing Dan with undercurrents of loathing and guilt and steely calculation.

Mell’s Larry is far less openly venal a creation than was Hinds, who played Larry as the angriest dog on the planet. The new colors are welcome. Mell knows how to hold back and still suggest the roiling jealousies underneath. It’s fine work.

Opening nights at the Taper, just like openings most other places, the audience likes to be supportive, which can lead to trouble. The Act 1 closer in “Closer” is a graphic bit of sexual goading, which got all the wrong laughs opening night. The tenor of Egan’s production tends to allow for a lighter experience than the play proved on Broadway.

It’s slick enough work, though Egan’s blocking patterns tend to be awfully diffuse and restless. Marber’s brand of acrid cleverness is bracketed in this production by the Bjork tune “Joga”--yearning or whiny or a distinctive mixture of both, depending on your feelings about Bjork. Same goes for the play. It’s extremely well-made. Yet epigrammatic precision in this case counts for only so much.

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* “Closer,” Mark Taper Forum, Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Also: Nov. 20, 8 p.m.; Dec. 6, 2:30 p.m. No performances Nov. 23 or evening of Dec. 10. Ends Dec. 10. $30-$44. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Maggie Gyllenhaal: Alice

Christopher Evan Welch: Dan

Randle Mell: Larry

Rebecca De Mornay: Anna

Written by Patrick Marber. Directed by Robert Egan. Scenic design by David Jenkins. Costumes by Deborah Nadoolman. Lighting by Amy Appleyard. Sound by Jon Gottlieb. Original music by Karl Fredrik Lundeberg. Additional music by Nathan Birnbaum. Production stage manager James T. McDermott.