Fifty Words
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
The Lounge Theatre
Through April 7
Playwright Michael Weller’s messy marital drama transpires over the course of one night, during which time a married couple unleash all the frustration, disappointment and unrequited passion they’ve kept bottled inside for 18 long years. The clash between these two misfortunate individuals is one of those horrid, emotionally draining events that take place all too frequently between unhappy spouses and partners. But that authenticity doesn’t make this drama any more engaging — especially in this production directed by Shane Stevens, where the mutual love that supposedly endures beneath the pain is difficult to discern.
Jan (Olga Konstantulakis) and Adam (Eric Larson) are striving-to-be upper- middle-class people living in a renovated brownstone in Brooklyn. Adam’s an architect, while Jan, a former dancer, is engaged in some undefined business-from-home enterprise involving dot coms. They have one young son, who on this particular night is sleeping over at the home of a friend. For the first time in a long time, Jan and Adam have their condo to themselves. Adam is feeling amorous, but Jan is preoccupied with her work and repeatedly shoos him off, much as you would a fly buzzing around your head.
Tensions escalate from there. Over the next few hours, secrets come pouring out, and what at first appeared to be an abiding if troubled relationship turns visceral and violent.
Not quite convincingly, however. Whereas Konstantulakis is impressive as a control freak capable of decimating a man (or woman) with a glacial eye or an arched eyebrow, she’s less believable when things heat up and she’s called upon to sizzle, either from anger or passion. Larson is more consistently credible, but the uncertainty of his character in his relationship with his wife seems to have seeped into his performance, which is less assured than one would have liked. He does have one very good scene at the end where he tells Jan off, and she’s been so thoroughly unpleasant, you’re on his side.
Which brings me to the play itself. I can’t say if Weller drew on personal experience when he wrote it, but from my perspective as a woman, the story’s male point-of-view comes off as embittered. While Adam, despite his misdeeds, is portrayed as the reasonable conciliator and the only partner in the marriage who seeks healing, Jan is depicted as vicious, vengeful and irrationally and irretrievably neurotic: She’s perfectly OK with hurting innocent people outside the marriage.
That bias is written into the script, but it’s underscored by Konstantulakis’s performance; when she tells Adam she loves him, the declaration rings hollow. Unfortunately, this performer can’t seem to shed her character’s cold, disdainful shell; when she tries to play vulnerable, it comes off as fake.
Also, some of the small details in the staging are off-kilter and undermining to the production as a whole. Jan spends the first half of the play working on her project (or trying to) at the kitchen table, wearing three-inch high heels the entire time. No doubt this is to help the actor stay in character, but who actually does that? A glass hurled in anger shatters against the wall, and no one sweeps it up till well into Act 2, even though the characters must step over and around the broken glass to get to the phone, which, for some reason has a cord, even though the story is set in 2008. The wine Jan pours for herself looks suspiciously like water, while the Chinese takeout cartons are only a third or half full (second performance of the weekend?).
Each of these details in itself isn’t a deal breaker but collectively they accrue. On a more positive note, apart from the anachronous phone, scenic designer John Mahr’s interior, though not elaborate, is aptly and attractively rendered.
The Lounge Theatre, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through April 7. fiftywords.brownpapertickets.com or (800) 838–3006. Running time: two hours and 10 minutes with an intermission.
