Stale views of gender dynamics power Eric Bogosian’s play about an aspiring actress caught in the clutches of a duplicitous man.
The actor and playwright Eric Bogosian blazed a career on Off Broadway stages in the 1980s and ’90s by mucking around in mankind’s basest instincts. In plays like the 1987 Pulitzer Prize finalist “Talk Radio,” about a self-destructive shock jock, and in monologue collections including “Drinking in America,” Bogosian dared audiences to face the darkest recesses of masculinity even as he compelled them to recoil. But his latest play is more likely to induce a cringe.
As the title might suggest, Bogosian’s schematic three-hander “1 + 1,” which opened at the SoHo Playhouse on Wednesday, is a kind of thought experiment. First performed in 2008, and now receiving its Off Broadway premiere in a co-production with The Black Box, “1 + 1” asks what happens when a man encounters a woman who embodies his most obvious fantasies and fears. The answer seems to be that desire is a source of weakness that makes the man into a fool. And the woman who is destroyed in the process? Consider her collateral damage.
Phil (Daniel Yaiullo) is the type who orders steak alone at lunch in Los Angeles, which is how he meets Brianne (Katie North), an aspiring actress waiting tables, a job she calls “something I have to do while I’m waiting for my life to begin.” He says he’s a photographer; she asks if he does headshots. Soon they’re back at his place, where he offers her a joint, asks whether she’s ticklish and persuades her to pose nude. “You’re such a tough cookie,” he coos, inaccurately, as she proves both impossibly gullible and exceptionally game.
They rapidly escalate to producing internet pornography and smoking crack, but Phil’s exploitation of Brianne is all too easy: She comes across as little more than a ventriloquist’s doll responding in kind to the men she attracts, including her manager at the restaurant, Carl (Michael Gardiner), who fawns over her and is standing by when her relationship with Phil inevitably goes south. Fast-forward five years, and Phil is sitting pretty with an office job, expecting a son with his wife, while Brianne’s life is in shambles. This is the part where she pivots from pinup and good-time girl to a family man’s worst nightmare.
Despite the play’s overload of clichés, it’s possible to imagine a production of “1 + 1” that takes into account the dramatic shift in public consciousness about gendered power dynamics over the past 15 years, but the director Matt Okin resists applying much of that hindsight. North’s performance chafes in vain against the material’s ick factor, to curious and frustrating ends. Brianne purrs and preens even as she expresses skepticism, and whines and demurs when she might bare real claws.
At least one part of the equation seems to hold: Lechery does make monsters and mincemeat of men, even if the ones depicted here face few consequences. But to imagine a woman who wants little more than to be desired and consumed is a stale and hollow provocation.
1 + 1
Through March 19 at the SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; sohoplayhouse.com. Running time: 1 hour and 45 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
