David Hare’s sex-driven, two-performer show “The Blue Room” opened at Signature Theatre last weekend, the steamiest production to play their stage since “Angels in America” in 1999.
“The Blue Room” was a big hit in London in 1998, in part because a nude Nicole Kidman played five of the 10 characters in the play. She repeated her performance, along with equally nude Iain Glen, in a limited but successful Broadway run.
This new production features just as much nudity as the Kidman/Glen version. Deborah Hazlett is the woman and Rick Holmes is the man. Both make their Signature debuts, bringing impressive credentials from local theaters, houses around the country and, in the case of Holmes, Broadway.
Hazlett and Holmes generate considerable heat as they handle the challenges of Hare’s play. Each is called upon to create five distinct characters over the course of this 95-minute, one-act play. Holmes is particularly successful in giving each of his characters different personalities, while Hazlett is adept at bridging the generation gap separating her characters, who range in age from teenage to maturity.
Hare’s “Blue Room” is a modern adaptation of an Austrian work from 1897. At the time, the play was considered so scandalous that it wasn’t even produced until 1921, and even then it resulted in legal action on obscenity charges against both its author, Arthur Schnitzler, and the cast.
Schnitzler’s play is legendary not only for its sexual content but for its structure. Essentially a series of one-scene plays, each about a sexual encounter, “The Blue Room” was unique for its time; each scene featured one of the lovers from the previous scene matched with a new lover, who carried into the subsequent scene. (Mathematicians might write the formula for the play as “A+B then B+C then C+D,” and so on through 10 iterations.)
Adding to the formality of that mathematical structure was the fact that each pairing moved up the socio-economic ladder of Viennese society. Hare used both elements of the formal structure in his adaptation but he also introduces a good deal of humor both in the dialogue between the characters and an ingenious method of tiptoeing around the graphic climax of each scene’s sexual act — each occurs as a “black out”, with a projection stating the amount of time involved.
In Hare’s adaptation the characters are The Girl, The Au Pair, The Married Woman, The Model and The Actress, all played by Hazlett, and The Cab Driver, The Student, The Politician, The Playwright and The Aristocrat, all played by Holmes.
Arena Stage’s Artistic Associate Wendy C. Goldberg directs her first show at Signature. She has not only brought a talented new cast to Signature, she also brought with her scenic designer Michael Brown, joining with frequent Signature designers Anne Kennedy, Timothy M. Thompson and Elsie Jones to create a unique look for this play.
Brown’s set consists of a white band, which starts as a ramp going along the floor from right to left, then slants up to the ceiling, turning back on itself and down so it creates a tunnel. Brown then lights that tunnel in different colors for different scenes.
It is a perfect metaphor for the way characters and their situations constantly circle back on each other. Despite the notoriety the play has earned for its for nudity, “The Blue Room” presents a very challenging task for a costume designer and Kennedy’s designs do an impressive job of quickly setting apart each character as the play moves through its couplings. The atmosphere is also enhanced by Thompson’s sound effects and musical cues.