If you haven’t discovered BAD HABIT
Productions for yourself, allow me to introduce you to one of the brightest
theater companies in town. Their ARCADIA
two seasons ago picked up top honors at the Independent Reviewers Awards. Their
GROSS INDECENCY was one of the best plays I saw last year. (Check to see if
they do it at this year’s IRNE Awards on April 29th.) Here they go
again with Patrick Marber’s CLOSER, his brilliantly cynical account of mating
and dating in the new millennium (playing at the BCA thru April 28th).
In Marber’s opinion, people only want what
they don’t have. Then they risk everything to get it and once they get it, they
don’t want it anymore. The same goes for love. They chase it. They squander it.
They lose it and they regret it. (CLOSER has been filmed with Jude Law, Julia
Roberts, Clive Owen and Natalie Portman but Leonard Maltin cautions in his
movie guide that it’s much better as a play.) I’m here to say it’s a ferocious
play and director Susanna Harris Noon doesn’t stint on the cruelty. The Bad
Habit production almost takes your breath away, it’s so savage (in the
appropriate scenes, I mean). And these are Brits (!) behaving badly.
Noon’s cast is perfection. Angela Keefe can
play gamine, then dangerous… pathetic, then powerful as the ex-stripper who is
the object of affection, at one time or another, of both Glen Moore’s sophisticated, shallow
novelist and Brooks Reeves’ desperate, exasperating dermatologist. Crystal Lisbon,
too, is sensational as the photographer who knowingly acts against her own
interests and throws in with a man she knows eventually will throw her over.
You’ve never seen so many bad choices.
Marber’s dialogue is smart and hip---and yes,
funny. You won’t guess where the play is going, even though you know there are
only four characters. You wouldn’t want to get close to these people in real
life but on stage, they’re riveting. Don’t miss the chance to see what a
crackerjack company can do with a script.
