After the Hue and Cry

British playwright David Hare calls “The Blue Room” “sort of an encyclopedia of defensive and offensive strategies that people use in the pursuit of love. What we feel about someone before we make love to them and what we feel after. What survives and what gets wrecked between desire and fulfillment.”

What survives in this case is a play best known for actress Nicole Kidman’s brief onstage nudity during its initial productions in London and New York in 1998. It premiered in London at the intimate, 251-seat Donmar Warehouse, where the drama offstage for tickets rivaled the drama onstage in what one London critic called “pure theatrical Viagra.”

Kidman says today that she was stunned by the attention. “I actually didn’t realize what was at stake for me. I just thought I was doing a play. I got lost in the rehearsal room,” she says. “I didn’t read any of the press leading up to it.”

The flood of publicity surrounding the show may have kept “The Blue Room” from being widely produced in the U.S., says Sheldon Epps, artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse, where the play opens today.

“I saw ‘The Blue Room’ on Broadway and really admired it,” Epps says. “I thought a lot of the virtues of the play were overshadowed by the sensationalism, and one of the advantages of being an artistic director is that you have a chance to reexamine work you admire.”

Adapted from Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler’s turn-of-the-century play “Reigen” (also the raw material for Max Ophuls’ classic 1950 film, “La Ronde”), “The Blue Room” is subtitled “a play in 10 intimate acts.”

Through 90 intermission-free minutes, just two actors portray 10 couples in 10 locales who meet, merge and maybe connect.

Directed by David Schweizer, the Pasadena production stars Arabella Field as the woman and Lenny Von Dohlen as the man, each donning and doffing not just clothes but characters of various classes, professions, ages and experiences. By the time the ronde is played out, an actress, playwright, model, student, au pair, politician, cab driver, married woman, aristocrat and prostitute couple and uncouple in a circle of encounters that concludes with the last man meeting the first woman.

It’s been a few years since Hare created those couplings, and, reached in Paris, where he is working on a screenplay, the dramatist pauses a moment to reflect. “I suppose the play is asking the question: What is fulfillment?” Hare suggests. “None of the characters in the play find fulfillment with each other, but you sense in the air that it is possible.”

Kidman was in London making “Eyes Wide Shut,” the late Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film based on a Schnitzler novel. Playwright Patrick Marber (“Closer”) introduced Kidman to Sam Mendes, artistic director of the small but high-profile Donmar Warehouse. Over lunch, she and Mendes discussed working together, and he suggested a contemporary “La Ronde” done with two actors. He took the idea to Hare and, says Kidman, “David jumped on board.”

He apparently looked a bit before he leaped, however. Noting that he’d earlier adapted Chekhov, Brecht and Pirandello and was in each case “very faithful” to the text, the 54-year-old playwright says he was initially wary about making so many changes to Schnitzler’s play. But encouraged by Mendes--”he said, ‘Why don’t you just try?’”--Hare wrote the play in just a few months.

“Schnitzler wrote his scenes never intending for them to be performed,” Hare says. “He never imagined it, partly because they were obscene and partly because they weren’t really in a dramatic form. When Ophuls made his film, he used no more than a fifth of the original text. It’s a work with which people have been very free.”

Hare allowed himself to be equally free. As he wrote in the New York Times in November 1998, he treated “Schnitzler’s text as a starting point for a more modern, maybe more romantic view of sexual yearning.” When he was finally done writing and rewriting it, he wrote, even he wasn’t sure “about who exactly is the principal author of the play.”

“I wrote what I wanted to write,” Hare says today, “then did fiddling around for Nicole to play to her strengths. It was a process I really enjoyed, a bit of bespoke tailoring fitted for Nicole and [her co-star] Iain Glen. I was choosing a few cuts, fitting the collar to the actor. That’s good fun as a playwright--seeing what you see in the actor and bringing it out.

“With Nicole, I saw a great sweetness in her, which is generally missed. You often see her as an ice maiden or lofty or unattainable, and one thing I tried to do was to make it warmer as it went on. Most plays start out warm and end up cold; this starts out cold and ends up warm, and I enjoyed that.”

Kidman has nothing but praise for the play and playwright. “The roles are so distinctly written,” says the actress, phoning from a film set in Sweden. “He writes so well for women. I really have such admiration for him in that regard. He never judges women. He’s much tougher on his men. The women’s motivations are more pure. His men are far more complicated. He forgives his female characters. His judgments tend to lie on his male characters, which is important; we need that slant, because so many male writers don’t do that.”

The ensuing “whirlwind of publicity was frightening to us all,” Hare says. “In London, I thought it had to do with sex--most of the English critics are middle-aged men, and it was a long time in their own lives since they’d seen anything like Nicole. And in New York, most of it was about fame. People in New York would be there not just to see her but would be looking for the Hollywood stars in the audience. We thought the phenomenon would go away, and it never went away.”

Caro Newling, executive producer of the nonprofit Donmar, says she thinks many audience members “had never been to a theater in their lives and were coming because of Nicole. But everyone interested in the theater wants to see a new play by David Hare. He has his finger on the pulse and knows how to reflect society back to society. He is the very leading playwright of his generation, and has been extremely influential since he started writing plays and will be until he stops.”

Reared in Sussex, the Cambridge-educated Hare in 1968 co-founded the Portable Theatre Company, which introduced many of his ideas of political theater. His first full-length play, “Slag,” was produced in London in 1970, and since then he has written more than two dozen original plays, translations and adaptations, several screenplays and books.

He has written about a Rupert Murdoch-like press baron in “Pravda” (with co-writer Howard Brenton), Oscar Wilde in “The Judas Kiss,” idealism in “Skylight” and the theater in “Amy’s View.” Beginning with his acclaimed look at postwar Britain in “Plenty” in 1978, Britain’s National Theatre produced 12 of his plays and adaptations over two decades, including the dense, thought-provoking trilogy in the early ‘90s of “Racing Demon,” “Murmuring Judges” and “The Absence of War,” which examined Britain’s contemporary church, judicial system and politics, respectively. In 1998, the same year “Blue Room” was produced, Hare himself performed in London and New York his “Via Dolorosa,” a monologue on the Middle East.

“There is an extraordinary number of plays of an extremely high standard,” says British director Richard Eyre, who headed the National Theatre when Hare wrote much of his work. Besides receiving many Olivier and other awards at home--he became Sir David Hare in 1997--Hare has been nominated for Tony Awards for U.S. productions of “Plenty” in 1983, “Racing Demon” in 1996 and “Skylight” in 1997.

“He has to write to live,” Eyre observes. “It’s what justifies his life. There’s a sort of dogged optimism. Walter Benjamin, I believe, said that one should possess optimism of the spirit and pessimism of the intellect, and that seems to terribly well describe David. He believes in the primacy of the theater as an artistic medium, so writing for the National is putting his talent where his heart is.”

Indeed, the playwright says, “Richard and I felt very strongly that a national theater should reflect national life. That you should be able to go there and see something you recognize of your own existence. It shouldn’t be a library with volumes about other periods of other people. I think one of the things theater does best is illuminate undercurrents that journalism misses and that we ourselves are so busy and don’t notice in our own lives. Theater can show you the direction of change in society.”

After the trilogy, Hare turned to plays examining different aspects of love--in “Skylight,” “Amy’s View” and “The Judas Kiss”--which perhaps coincidentally follow his second marriage, in 1992, to French fashion designer Nicole Farhi. Says Hare: “I was just exhausted in writing these three big, epic plays and interested in what you could do with smaller resources.”

Eyre thinks Hare “felt he had to move on to a different territory. I think he’s very much led by subjects. He gets the sniff of something that seems good and follows that. That’s how the trilogy started--with ‘Racing Demon,’ about the Church of England, which seemed initially to be quasi-documentary and developed into something very profound.”

Playwrights have a responsibility, Hare implies again and again. “I have such a clear idea of what a play should be about,” he says. “I think I’d be a better playwright if I didn’t. I’ve spent my life believing in something, namely a social theater. I can’t personally write a play, no mater how trivial, without some idea of what I want the politics to be and what politics inform the play. I need to ask what it’s about, and why the play exists--I can’t work without that.”

Hare has complained in print of plays “running off into the distance in a chicken-headed flight from content,” and when “The Blue Room” was first produced, some critics felt Hare was doing the same. “The piece has this rep for being a series of sex trips, and we’re not backing away from that,” says Schweizer, the director of the Pasadena production. “You need actors who have some personal charisma, good old-fashioned sex appeal and the chameleon-like ability to transform themselves. Arabella and Lenny are both really attractive, and they’ll shed their clothes at a certain point--but it’s not the point.

“David Hare, as always, is making really incisive observations about the intersection between social class and sexuality and behavior,” Schweizer continues. “There is also a kind of theater-loving playfulness, a sense of mischief about theater-making and how to use the theater. Suddenly a scene will seem almost like a Noel Coward ancestor and then you’ll be on the street, neo-John Osborne.”

Hare’s knowledge of the theater extends to offstage practicalities, according to British producer Robert Fox, who has produced several Hare plays in London and New York. “A lot of writers don’t understand the process,” Fox says. “They understand writing. He’s very practical as well as creative. He’s very smart about how things get done and what works in casting and publicity. He understands all the elements that go into producing a play, which is good for a producer, because one has a shorthand with him.”

Fox is producing “Breath of Life,” a new Hare play scheduled to premiere on London’s West End next September with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench (who won a Tony in 1999 for her work in Hare’s “Amy’s View”). Hare doesn’t really write parts for particular actors, he says, “but it happens that if you write in certain age groups, people suggest themselves. When I finished the play, it was clear Maggie Smith was the preeminent choice. Judi Dench was Maggie’s idea. The part as it was written wasn’t the way people had seen Judi before, and it hadn’t occurred to me. Maggie said she always wanted to do a play with Judi.”

“Breath of Life,” Hare says, “is about the way a woman’s life is shaped so completely differently by our improved living standards and health in the West so women in their 60s don’t see themselves as old people. Women of a certain age are still living rich and fulfilled lives, something almost unimaginable in previous centuries. My parents seemed like old people at 60, but Maggie and Judi don’t. The span of our imaginative lives is now so much more attenuated, and we keep our vitality so much longer.”

Hare directed three films in the ‘80s, then stopped. Each was less successful than the previous one, he says today, “and I felt the climate for the kind of film I wanted to make wasn’t very friendly. I felt the toil of raising the money and [the response] from audiences was becoming progressively less rewarding. I simply felt in my 40s that I very much wanted to see how far I could go as a playwright and work at that exclusively.”

He has continued writing films, however. Due later this year, for instance, is his adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Hours,” directed by Stephen Daldry and produced by Scott Rudin. That film stars Kidman as Virginia Woolf. The actress says Hare wrote “the most beautiful character for me. Judi Dench and I were talking the other day about how he’s very difficult to learn because his sentence structure is unusual and you have to learn it word for word. You want to learn it properly. You really want to do it justice.”

Kidman says she’d love to do another play with Hare, either in New York or London, commenting on both the caliber of his writing and his ability to make her laugh. “There are few people in the industry where you can say, ‘I really like this person and admire what they’re doing,’ and David is one of those people,” Kidman says. “I hope to have a lifelong relationship with him.”

Kidman brought Hare a film project about artist Lee Miller, she adds, but first Hare must complete the screenplay for “The Corrections,” Jonathan Franzen’s highly publicized novel. Writing in Paris, where there are fewer intrusions on his time, Hare says when he tells people that’s what he’s doing, “everybody reels in horror. Everyone says, ‘You must be out of your mind,’ including Franzen.”

With “The Corrections” as with “The Hours,” he appreciates the novel more as he works on the screenplay. “You do enter a very long relationship with the work,” Hare says. “I think it is tapping me into something we don’t have in England--American social novels.

“I suppose in the literary world, the British genius traditionally is for the performing arts and the American genius is for the novel. The sheer fertility of the American novel is just dazzling to the English. I am lucky enough to be part of a generation of 30 or 40 good, interesting playwrights, and I don’t think the field is as rich in America as it is here.”

Whether he’s working on a play or screenplay, Hare says, he writes most days. “I’ve done it for 30 years. It’s a way of life. You just have to not be frightened of being alone all the time. I was thinking today that I wouldn’t know what else to do.”

“The Blue Room,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Today through April 21. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m., Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Today only: 5 p.m. Tickets: $29.50-$44.50. (626) 356-PLAY.

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Barbara Isenberg is the author of “State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work.” She is a regular contributor to Calendar.