Sex.
Have I got your attention now?
Under a new artistic administration headed by Keith Garsson, The Theatre at Arts Garage opens its new season with an attention-grabbing play called Sex with Strangers by Laura Eason, a staff writer for Netflix’s House of Cards.
While the title is hardly misleading — the opening scene and several others end with the play’s two characters ripping off each other’s clothes with mounting passion — Eason has plenty on her mind as well, like themes of identity, authorship, trust and emotional manipulation. The sex, alas, mostly happens offstage, after the lights fade to black.
As the play begins, a 20-ish, cocksure blogger named Ethan (Michael Uribe) arrives through a blizzard to a Michigan writers’ retreat where 30-something Olivia, a schoolteacher and unsuccessful novelist, was hoping to spend the week alone. Ethan disrupts Olivia’s solitude, insisting on reading the manuscript of her second, still unpublished novel and annoying her even more with the news that he is the author of the runaway best-selling e-book, Sex with Strangers.
The book is an account of his sexual conquests, a string of anonymous women he has met in bars, taken to bed and then callously discarded. Not only did it become must-reading for much of the country, now Hollywood is after Ethan to adapt his work into a screenplay. Olivia is appalled, but also intrigued and, despite her better judgment, she becomes the next notch on Ethan’s belt.
It is a credibility-stretcher, but we are then asked to believe that he becomes emotionally attached to this woman. He introduces her to the world of social media and to electronic publishing, where Olivia — under an assumed name — also becomes rich and “famous.” But who is using whom?
Neither character is a model of ethical or moral decorum, and Eason plays with our allegiances, whipsawing us from Ethan to Olivia and occasionally turning us off to them both.
Fortunately, we remain increasingly impressed by the two performers, who each display verbal and physical agility. Uribe, so compelling in Island City’s Little Dog Laughed last season, is completely convincing as the well-toned, self-assured cad, an alien creature to Olivia and all the more attractive to her because of it. Laggy, a fixture of the defunct Women’s Theatre Project and Parade Productions, has more of a performance arc to play, moving from mousy reticence to unbridled ambition.
Croft uses the space well, moving her actors about the two attractive, functional sets credited to Bombshell Productions. Sex with Strangers is smart, smart-mouthed and, yes, sexy, a very promising start for Garsson and company.
SEX WITH STRANGERS, Theatre at Arts Garage, 180 N.E, 1st St., Delray Beach. Through Sunday, Nov. 15. $40-$45. Call: 561-450-6357.