Belleville 

Reviewed by Neal Weaver 
The Pasadena Playhouse 
Through May 13 

Amy Herzog’s play begins quietly enough. Abby (Anna Camp) and Zack (Thomas Sadoski) are a married couple living in the Belleville section of Paris. She is a yoga teacher, and he works for Doctors Without Borders fighting pediatric AIDS. The action begins when Abby arrives home early one day and walks in on Zack watching internet porn and masturbating, which casts a disturbing light on their relationship. Zack, who seems a bit too fond of smoking pot, goes off to take a shower, leaving Anna to cope with the arrival of their African landlord, Alioune (Moe Jeudy-Lamour). Anna is nervous and skittish and talks non-stop — seemingly a charming, slightly dotty chatterbox.

When Zack emerges from the shower, his conversation with Alioune reveals that he is far behind with his rent, and Alioune wants to collect. Zach makes excuses and promises, and Alioune departs.

Things go downhill from there. Anna and Zack’s superficially successful marriage is riddled with secrets and conflicts. They barely know each other, and what they think they know isn’t necessarily true. They moved to Paris because each thought that was what the other wanted, and neither is particularly happy there. Neither wanted to get married, but neither had the courage to say so. They console themselves with sex and chemicals: he with pot, and she with alcohol.

As tension between them mounts, she accuses him of exerting terrible pressure on her to be happy. “I am not happy,” she asserts. And then the truths and conflicts spill out, as each blames the other. She is a father-dependent manipulator, who indulges in self-mutilation, aborted suicide attempts and — when things get tough — binge drinking herself into upchucking oblivion. He is a liar and a fraud, and everything she thought she knew about him proves false. A lurking violence begins to rise to the surface.

Herzog’s script is cannily constructed, and the characters are sketched in acid. But both Anna and Zach are so dishonest, morally compromised, and unpleasant that it gets harder and harder to care about them. When the combat turns toward actual violence, one wishes it had come sooner. And the endlessly protracted ending becomes seriously exasperating.

Director Jenna Worsham gives the piece a faithful production, and the actors all do fine work. Camp’s Anna is a complex portrait of a woman with a passion for making painful scenes, and Sadoski offers us a bumbling hypocrite and natural victim. Jeudy-Lamour gives a stylish turn to a character that is basically just a feed for Zach, and Sharon Pierre-Louis is largely wasted in the thankless role of Alioune’s wife.

David Meyer’s set is pleasant and useful, and the other credits are expertly handled.

The Pasadena Playhouse, 39 South El Molino Avenue, Pasadena; Wed.-Friday, 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. (626) 356-7529 or PasadenaPlayhouse.org. Running time: One hour and 35 minutes, with no intermission.