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| Show | Did He Like It?* |
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Brooke Berman's A Perfect Couple is about three best friends and their young next door neighbor. Over a long summer weekend in the country, secrets are revealed and bonds are tested, forcing these friends to discover who they are now, versus who they thought they would become. Click here for tickets. |
Relationships and the City, and a Little Band of Gold
*By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: June 20, 2008
All advice givers and etiquette experts — from Emily Post to Ann Landers, Miss Manners to Dan Savage — can probably agree on at least one admonition, namely that reading someone else’s diary is a no-no. “A Perfect Couple,” a new play by Brooke Berman at the DR2 Theater, suggests that the death of the diarist does not necessarily alter this ironclad rule.
Ms. Berman’s slight but enjoyable comedy-drama, about a couple planning to wed after 15 years (mostly) together, turns on the discovery of a journal kept by the stepmother of the groom-to-be. A vivid, 10-year-old passage in which Stepmom muses on just who the right girl for her stepson might be is read by the wrong eyes, with consequences that threaten to alter the lives of bride, groom and the bride’s closest friend.
Set at a country house in upstate New York over a lazy weekend, “A Perfect Couple” does not have the sparkle or the distinctive characters of Ms. Berman’s “Hunting and Gathering,” presented earlier in the year by Primary Stages. And the production, directed by Maria Mileaf, feels a bit tentative and under-rehearsed; the play’s rhythms rarely have the easy intimacy that would lend the material a potent emotional undertow. But Ms. Berman has a breezy, accessible voice and a vigorous interest in turning over the rocks in contemporary relationships to find out what is growing underneath.
Amy (Dana Eskelson) and Isaac (James Waterston), both around 40, have settled into a happy routine, made happier, in Amy’s case, by Isaac’s acquiescence in making it official at last. Amy, who has called the shots in the relationship for a while, has decided it’s time to have a child and wants the wedding band too. They have invited Amy’s best friend since college, Emma (Annie McNamara), for a weekend of sharing the joy.
She is happy to partake but also firmly asserts her contentment at being single and carefree, despite the arrival of what was once called middle age. A nerdy-chic type with cool glasses and a barroom pallor, Emma still takes up with the occasional wrong guy but is also happy just to sleep around a little — mostly with younger men.
She’s sort of a hipster version of Miranda from “Sex and the City.” “A Perfect Couple” often recalls that series and, for that matter, any number of other television comedies centering on the man-woman thing. Amy and Emma, Isaac and their younger neighbor Josh (Elan Moss-Bachrach) sit around the dining table while the wine bottles pile up, exchanging insights and observations about the rituals of dating and mating, and how perspectives shift according to age and relationship status.
“Men are taught that the grand adventure of their lives will be work,” Emma says. “Women are taught that it will be relationship. We move through the world looking for our grand adventure in the form of romantic love, deep friendship, erotic connection. Men move through the world looking to create, to build, to fight.”
Amy demurs, claiming she does not see her wedding as the ultimate adventure of her life. And yet she harangues Emma almost continually about her sad singledom, with the sympathetic Isaac occasionally chiming in. Eventually a nettled Emma announces: “We all need to stop discussing my being single like it’s a disease. There is nothing wrong with my life.”
The discovery of the fateful journal, among piles of detritus in the attic, alters the casual chemistry of the weekend for good, causing Amy, Isaac and Emma to excavate the history of their relationships, with all taking stock of what is right and wrong with the lives they have forged.
Although the cast is personable and attractive, the actors don’t seem to have made strong connections to their characters. Ms. Eskelson’s Amy undergoes a fairly radical transformation that she cannot quite make emotionally credible; hints in the early going that Amy’s chipper surface hides uncertainties would help. Ms. McNamara offers some lively comic line readings, but she does not seem fully at ease in the play’s domestic-comedy naturalism. (She’s a member of the experimental downtown troupe Elevator Repair Service.)
The distances between actors do in some sense mirror the distances between characters, as these friendly intimates grow to suspect that the assumptions they have long made about one another — and perhaps about themselves — may need some rethinking. This acknowledgment of the complicated, possibly deceptive nature of many close friendships is the play’s strongest asset. As Amy says with a sense of wariness toward the end, “I’m just suggesting — maybe a great many things we thought were true are not.”
Click here for tickets to A Perfect Couple.
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