Samuel West, left, and Scott Cohen play lovers who rep the U.K. and America, respectively, in Caryl Churchill's allegory 'Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?'
A Public Theater and Royal Court Theater presentation of a play in one act by Caryl Churchill. Directed by James Macdonald.
Guy - Samuel West
Sam - Scott Cohen
The idea is ingenious in its simplicity -- distilling a half-century of British-American relations into a darkly sexualized love affair between two men, one conflicted yet fawning and compliant, the other an unscrupulous manipulator. And what playwright could be more adept at translating that allegory of insidious interdependency into austere, elliptical language than Caryl Churchill? But despite the arresting stagecraft of James Macdonald's production, suggesting a rigorous symbiosis between director and writer, "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" is a short, sharp provocation that feels just a tad too easy.
It's also untimely. Back in 2006, when the play premiered at the Royal Court, its chastening reprimand to a kowtowing British government, and its moral outrage at American omnipotence had currency. Sure, the tortured relationship is ongoing and the aberrations of U.S. foreign policy cataloged here are unlikely to cease overnight. But nothing dates faster than political theater, and America's head right now is someplace else.
As much as the narrowing field of presidential candidates looks to the wrongs of the current White House administration and its predecessors as a frame of reference for change, the country's zeitgeist has shifted. It might be too early to call it a forward-thinking view or even to define the national mood as one of cautious hope. But America appears more eager than at any time in the past 40 years to acknowledge its failings and welcome new solutions. That makes the bruising diatribe of Churchill's play -- no matter how brilliant its delivery -- seem oddly out of step with the times.
The taut pas de deux begins with the reunion of two men who fell in love one night in a bar. Guy (Samuel West) is an Englishman who still loves his wife and children but is unable to resist seductive, self-assured American Sam (Scott Cohen). Guy has come to say goodbye before Sam returns home the next day, but when the latter suggests Guy leave everything behind and join him, the besotted Brit is helpless to overcome his resistance.
In a surreal fashion amplified by the contributions of set designer Eugene Lee and lighting chief Peter Mumford, the charged intimacy of this opening encounter is heightened rather than diminished as the conversation turns from personal commitment to political engagement.
Throughout the one-act play's eight short scenes, punctuated by blackouts and Matthew Herbert's mood-mutating music, the two men are perched -- initially as awkward acquaintances, then as cozy post-coital lovers or petulantly feuding domestic partners -- on a sofa isolated in darkness.
With each shift in the relationship, the sofa floats higher off the ground as Mumford gradually adjusts the enveloping light from a warm caress to a more tenebrous grip. With the stage boxed in by a vaudevillian frame of light bulbs, the two characters are adrift from reality, with props like a lighted cigarette or a cup of coffee magically appearing out of the surrounding blackness and then disappearing again.
In Churchill's characteristic style of dialogue clipped back into terse interruptus verse and overlapping, unfinished sentences, the two men cement their union while discussing covert and official intervention in Vietnam, Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua, South Korea, Grenada, El Salvador and Cambodia, on through Afghanistan and Iraq.
Guy gets instructed on the practice of preventing elections and manipulating regimes ("Overthrow only as a last resort when things don't..."), military solutions, the necessary implementation of torture and controlled genocide, the drug trade, WMDs, chemical warfare and nuclear power.
Mostly, Guy coos submissively through the boys' war games, swooning with admiration for his dominant partner. Occasionally, the Brit's anxiety about the politics of destabilization, about locking his country into unpopular shared policies, about climate change, carbon emissions or his discomfort concerning the special treatment afforded Israel causes him to question Sam's bullish approach. But the American demands nothing less than "total commitment," obtaining it in one chilling scene by administering a calming injection of CIA-controlled heroin.
Grim as it is, the lethal, stream-of-consciousness pillow talk in this seedy "Dr. Strangelove" romance is spiced with mordant humor that mercilessly nails the oblivious arrogance of American government (on privatization: "Because private means free"; on space colonization: "Deny others the use of space. ... We have it, we like it, and we're going to keep it.").
And while the play is basically an angry, condensed editorial rant in which the characters never evolve beyond being national mouthpieces, West and Cohen are mesmerizing, their uneasy to-and-fro echoing the playwright's incomparable skill at making language, as much as actions, a dangerous monster.
But there's an unapologetic narrowness of perspective here that's troubling. In recent plays "A Number" and "Far Away," Churchill packed much greater density and dimension into a single hour of verbal drama. But those nightmarish visions of the future displayed a sensitivity crucially lacking here in a play in which the sense of doom is focused on a process already well under way.
The British writer leaves herself open to charges of unnuanced anti-Americanism that might have come from a far less exacting intellect. Even the mere fact of a play script, otherwise bereft of stage directions, that identifies Sam as "a country" and Guy as "a man" suggests Churchill's eagerness to lay blame at the feet of all Americans while reserving her scorn on the other side of the pond for toadying politicians -- Tony Blair chief among them. The Brit side also gets the play's sole shred of hope: "Maybe I can't live with you any more," says an increasingly alienated Guy.
Sam is a string of foreign policy advisers from Kissinger through Wolfowitz but also an interchangeable series of presidents from Nixon to Reagan to Bush pere et fils. And as the name suggests, he's every American, a charge likely to rankle the liberal-leaning audiences that flock to the Public.
Churchill's refusal to pander to her audience and her insistence on making them work always yields bracing theater. But when your main character's unrepentant guilt is established from the outset, the drama becomes less a developing conflict than an articulate, masterfully staged harangue.
Set, Eugene Lee; costumes, Susan Hilferty; lighting, Peter Mumford; original music, Matthew Herbert; sound, Danny Erdberg; production stage manager, Michael McGoff. Opened March 16, 2008. Reviewed March 13. Running time: 45 MIN.
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Date in print: Mon., Mar. 24, 2008