Review: Flawed Though Rousing; THE INTIMACY EFFECT

Two brothers and their wives visit with each other while revealing their inner thoughts as asides. Giving voice to the subtext may be nothing new to theatre - Eugene O'neil's STRANGE INTERLUDE comes to mind - but Jeffrey Tabnick's THE INTIMACY EFFECT is the rare play to deploy the technique so widely in an otherwise hyper-realistic setting. While what is revealed during this direct address certainly adds spice to the living-room production, one wishes there had been more show than tell and more talking to each other than to the audience.

Presented at Vital Joint, a cozy basement level Brooklyn studio apartment that has been transformed into a theatre venue, the production feels more than intimate; It feels suffocating. There is nowhere to escape and little room for dramatic plot points to air, particularly with the balls to the front-yard performance-style favoured by these actors. This has the unfortunate side effect of placing "air quotes" around certain pronouncements, such as when all four of the main characters deliver lengthy chunks of expository asides that overlap with each other, as if they were trading off the narration of a ghostly campfire story. Though these bits are well told, their very telling stops the action cold, transforming the play into a talk-therapy fest.

Eric Nightengale's directorial solution to this dilemma is to treat the play as if it were a "dash to the finish" thriller instead of the suspenseful drama that it is. That approach might have worked in a more fleshed-out play, but in this underwritten emotional landmine-laden piece, one begins to lose patience with "every new REVEAL". THE INTIMACY EFFECT follows a classic formula: "If you tell them what happened I'm going to be so mad!" Predictably, "what happened" is told to less than satisfying, at least in this rushed production, effect. This is partially because the audience knows what happens before the characters do creating a loop of reacting to something we have already processed. Another faulty component is that not enough time is given to allow the drama to simmer. At a brisk 63 minutes, the more uncomfortable moments are brushed over and discarded before one has the time to fully appreciate them.

None of that has any bearing upon the actors who are uniformly excellent as a certain subset of White people: privileged brothers, though one is more secure than the other, with wives who are resentful even if they don't quite know how to voice their discontent. As Amy, Jennifer O'Donnell exudes a barely hanging-on, full postpartum glory. She delivers every word as an accusation picking away at the very security that she needs to survive this crisis intact, because she feels that she cannot rely upon it. In extreme contrast, Ruth Nightengale plays her daftly chipper sister-in-law with chirruping pluckiness, unveiling the uncanny portrait of a smug housewife blind to her husband's lascivious nature. Her devastation at the grand revelation is the play's one true bomb blast; it leaves the audience paralyzed at her shock, unsure of how to move forward.

In trying to determine if she was raped, even though she definitely could not have given consent, Sarah Doudna ably embodies this age of confronting sexual violence: ambivalence, shame, anger, hope, and confusion convulse her frame as she accuses the the wrong man and walks away doubting that a violation took place, even though she has living proof; a child. In her final moment, she is alive in the worst way possible: believing she might be wrong even as those who know that she is right conspire to conceal the facts. Doudna's humiliation is frightening to behold: she smiles, apologizes, and departs with dignity in tatters; a broken woman, too tired to disguise her cracks. That's the beauty of this play - well before the misdeeds of Weinstein, Lauer, Spacey, and Rose detonated in our laps, it was showing the poison of sexual violence in quiet spaces.

These virtues do not overcome the play's central flaw. This is a woman's story told in the way that plays penned by men usually are: as if the male perspective mattered. In giving equal weight to his male characters, Tabnick unwittingly elevates the male version of the glorified girlfriend to star status. Curiously, even when focused on his men, Tabnick fails to render their drama as well as he does his women's. It is as if he knows that they are not the main feature. We hear about one husband's violent behaviour and are given no evidence of it, even though this violence is enough to threaten his marriage. It is a subplot that fails to chart, that stands in the way of what really matters: the women who hold everything together even as their worlds are falling apart.

THE INTIMACY EFFECT originally ran at Vital Joint from September 28 - October 14, 2017.

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