This is a play about a couch. There I was at a Sunday evening performance of Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? at New York’s Public Theater. Yes, this barely-a-play (at 45 minutes, a hair longer than an old Warner Bros. serials) yielded fitful laughs but that was all. The first 10 minutes gives the game away: in this allegory peopled by two gay men (what are you saying, Caryl Churchill?) about the relationship between America and Great Britain, the U.S. is the top; the U.K. is the bottom—that’s it, that’s the play.
So there’s nothing left to do but focus on the couch. The two protagonists (Sam, a country, and Guy, a man) carry out their courtship on this single set place, a lovely slab of beige framed by utter black (ooh, the void…) that occasionally levitates (you silly world powers, come back down to earth!) while our heroes spew pause-filled provocations as foreplay. Politics was never so sexless (the actors’ bare feet is all the flesh on view); soon my thoughts drifted to what better use two men might put that sofa to, furniture as metaphor, Sam West’s (as Guy) heartbreaking performance as Leonard Bast in Merchant-Ivory’s Howard’s End, the demise of Scott Cohen’s (Sam) new series with Parker Posey and how disorienting it felt to be out on a Sunday night. This playwright’s Top Girls is being revived this spring, a career watershed promising more complexity from the distaff side than that wrested from these poor saps. Wonder if there’s a couch…
Photo, Sara Krulwich