Come Again?
By Jonathan Kalb
Life (x) 3
By Yasmina Reza
Circle in the Square
1633 Broadway at 50th St.
Box Office: (212) 239-6200
Yasmina Reza's Life (x) 3 is a play
that keeps starting over. It presents three different versions of the
same disastrous evening in a Paris apartment, when an astrophysicist
named Henry (John Turturro) and his lawyer wife Sonia (Helen Hunt) are
trying to get their six-year-old settled for the night and dinner guests
arrive who were expected for the following evening. A few other playwrights
have worked this vein before, by which I mean the device of repeating
the same scene in different variations, not the unbelievably shopworn
circumstance of a dinner party that never gets going. J.B. Priestley,
Alan Ayckbourn, Michael Frayn, and Caryl Churchill have all experimented,
variously, in déjà vu by design, and all have wedded the device
to interesting themes and ideas. Reza, by contrast, leaves one seriously
suspecting that she cobbled together the false starts of a draft she
couldn't finish and served them up as a half-baked meditation on relativity.
But perhaps it's unfair to start this way. Let me take that again.
Yasmina Reza's Life (x) 3 is a play
that keeps starting over. In the smoothly bland production that recently
opened at Circle in the Square, directed by Matthew Warchus (who also
directed the critically acclaimed London production of 2000), it is
spiced up between scenes with a really cool blue-laser-cube effect that
flashes to loud music while the round rug-and-couch set revolves to
show different perspectives (design by Mark Thompson). The play does
win early points for realism as Turturro and Hunt find numerous subtle
shadings in a nasty spat over parental values provoked by their exasperating
six-year-old. That plausibility doesn't last long, though, as all the
rest of the squabbling and backbiting that follow in the first scene
are worthy of the laser cube and strongly reminiscent of the utterly
incredible screaming fits between straight, self-contained guy-guy friends
in Reza's slick 1998 Broadway hit Art.
The matchup with the visiting couple is pure
sitcom. Hubert (Brent Spiner), a smug senior scientist whose recommendation
Henry needs for promotion, badgers his wife Inez (Linda Emond) with
tritely boorish insults, making it laughable that a self-possessed beauty
like Sonia would ever fall for him. Meanwhile, Hubert harbors casual
malice toward Henry. Knowing that the latter hasn't published in three
years, Hubert drops the bombshell that the paper he's staked his future
on has probably been scooped by Mexican scientists. The only apparent
motive for this malice is the provocation of snickers among anti-intellectual
spectators thrilled by the circumstance's exaggerated publish-or-perish
terror. Other would-be metaphysical mysteries include: why do the guests
decide to stay and munch Cheeze-Its and chocolate fingers rather than
reschedule the dinner? And why don't their hosts, both worldly professionals,
think of ordering take-out? But perhaps I've rushed to judgement. Let
me try again.
Because Yasmina Reza's Life (x) 3 is
a play that keeps starting over, with mostly unremarkable dialogue by
indifferently conceived characters who occasionally wax astrophysical,
the only source of clues to its putative larger game is in the differences
between the scenes. The second time through, the scenario is just as
implausible, with Henry getting sloppily drunk and aggressive, and Hubert
defending himself well enough until much maligned Inez points up his
disingenuousness and leaves the party in hysterical tears. The third
variation takes a wholly new contemplative tone, beginning with a sweeping
philosophical monologue by Hubert regarding the humane grandeur of cosmological
study and integrated scientific knowledge and continuing with a manic-depressive
collapse into melancholy on Henry's part. Hubert drops his news about
the Mexicans, but Henry takes it with equanimity and we learn later
that it's not career-shattering after all. In a casual inspection of
the nature of manic depression, we find out that neither Hubert's two-facedness
nor Sonia's infidelity are really the cause of Henry's depression.
The implication (supporting my earlier surmise)
is that Reza had no deeper subject to begin with but eventually found
one that felt hip and philosophical enough to suffice as content for
those who don't look or listen too hard: randomness. Often, things go
wrong without anyone being able to say exactly why. Eureka! Life (at
least when replicated three times) isn't a melodrama or a sitcom. As
Henry says about his research on "the shape of dark-matter halos," sometimes
an object really is as flat as it looks, even when scores of intelligent
people insist that must be three-dimensional.