Theater: The Bottom Line. - Review - theater reviews

National Review, Jan 25, 1999 by Rod Dreher

Mr. Dreher is chief film critic for the New York Post.

The hottest ticket currently on Broadway is The Blue Room, or as it is more colloquially known, "That Nicole-Kidman-Gets-Butt-Naked Play." She really does get naked, though very briefly, and all we see is her well-toned haunches. And truth to tell, Mrs. Tom Cruise is probably in a flesh-colored body stocking. Caveat emptor, babe.

Still, the prospect of seeing a Hollywood starlet's rear end in the flesh tells you everything you need to know about why the $35 tickets for the production's limited three-month run can be had only from a ticket broker asking $300 a pop-if they can be had at all. It doesn't hurt, of course, that word has gotten out that the play is all about S-E-X. Every article about it has included a panting London Daily Telegraph reviewer's description of Miss Kidman as "pure theatrical Viagra." Well, golly.

Unfortunately, as with so much contemporary sex, all the pleasure of the play is in the anticipation. Though only a blind man or a eunuch could fail to appreciate the, um, artfulness of Miss Kidman's sculpted form, The Blue Room is pure theatrical saltpeter. There's a good philosophical reason for that, one that explains not only the crazed clamor for Blue Room tickets, but also why this dreary, vapid, airless evening of theater is such a depressingly accurate reflection of our time.

The celebrated English playwright David Hare loosely adapted The Blue Room from Arthur Schnitzler's Riegen, later known more widely as La Ronde, thanks to Max Ophuls's 1950 film. The Hare version is a series of vignettes: each features a man and a woman who, at some point during the scene, have sex (the lights go dark at the moment of impact, we hear an electric crackle, and are told how long the blessed event lasts). Miss Kidman and the English stage actor Iain Glen each play five very different roles; the gimmick here is that one canoodler remains onstage to appear in the scene that follows, while the other leaves, returning as a different person. In time, all ten characters form a sexual daisy chain that links men and women of diverse classes, temperaments, ages, and levels of experience.

It's easy to imagine what a shock these vignettes must have delivered to Schnitzler's cultured audiences in 1920s Vienna, but at this late date in the sexual revolution, especially after the year-long Lewinskian Thermidor, it's all very old hat. Been there, done that, saw it on C-SPAN.

In fact, our inability to be moved one way or the other by the hard-panting goings-on in The Blue Room is, intentionally or not, part of its point. The play is about sex in general and lust in particular. Lust-its power, its persistence, and its ability to desiccate the human heart. The cab driver couples furtively with the hooker on the quai, then has a quickie with the au pair in a back room; the au pair seduces a nervous student, who later tangles with a married lover, and so forth.

Nobody is satisfied. Yet they stagger onward from assignation to assignation, in search of a kind of fulfillment and transcendence that, paradoxically, their concupiscent prowling guarantees they will never find. Sex is depicted here as a power struggle fraught with confusion and conflicting expectations, each man's or woman's identity reduced to a poker face used to bluff for advantage in a high-stakes game. By evening's end, the quantity and variety of erotic permutations have emptied sex of any meaning, and Miss Kidman and Mr. Glen wear only the depressing anonymity of porn actors. They might as well be blowing their noses or brushing their teeth.

This, no doubt, disappoints audience members eager to play Peeping Tom for a few hours, but it makes perfect sense. The "blue" in the title-it comes from a song with which a Glen character serenades his sweetie-laments the loneliness and futility of this kind of self-gratifying sex, the only kind we ever see in the play. These characters are in deep philosophical crisis, but only one, a bored aristocrat who makes his appearance late in the play, seems the slightest bit aware of it.

"My life is a search for a love that stays real," he sighs to his actress lover.

"Are you saying nothing is worth doing because nothing ends well?" she later replies. "This way, at least we're alive."

I screw, therefore I am. Sex is certainly an ignoble basis for a metaphysics, but who can deny that it's the one most people these days seem to swear by? When a society becomes unmoored from traditional religious belief or moral idealism, and in the absence of social stigma as an external reinforcement of inwardly held virtue, it is no surprise that the sex instinct will assert its rule as if by divine right. And a society in which the cheap thrills of celebrity and quickie sex are sovereign is a society willing to pay anything for the chance to see a famous actress's rear end in shallow, pseudo-highbrow erotica-which can't even boast of a positive review in the Times.

Yet the play is so thinly developed that this point seems to be lost on the Broadway crowd. In the throng outside the Cort Theatre after the performance, an audience member, clearly a tourist, was asked by friends who hadn't seen the play what it was about. The man tried a couple of muddle-headed explanations, then admitted that, aside from something to do with sex and Nicole Kidman's tuchus, he hadn't the faintest idea.