No one gets Closer in Marber's play

Relationships are filled with paradoxes. For instance, only a certain amount of distance will grant you true intimacy and too much truthfulness is more dishonest than outright lies.

If you doubt either of those principles, I encourage you to catch a performance of Patrick Marber’s Closer. I’d suggest reading the script, but I truly found the performance to be the far more powerful of the two experiences. If none of your local theater companies are performing this intense, provocative play, take comfort in that it will be in the movie theaters in December with Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law, and Clive Owen playing the leading roles and Mike Nichols directing.

I’m uncertain, though, whether the silver screen is really the place for this treatise on intimacy and honesty. It may let you escape some of the more forceful issues by the simple distance of the screen and actors. The stage play is a four-person show that follows the intermingling of two men and two women over a period of four and a half years:

Dan, a failed novelist and obituary writer
Alice, a young stripper
Larry, a dermatologist
Anna, a photographer

All of them are searching for things they never find—love, intimacy, companionship, truth. Anna, the photographer looking for strangers, is the one who comes closest to fulfilling her quest, but she still walks away lonely and questioning. In the end, it seems she is determined to stop repeating disaster, but you’re not convinced that she’s learned enough to find happiness. There seems to be little hope for any of the other characters.

Be forewarned. Closer is a brutal play. It rivals Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for sheer brutality and cruelty. Except in Closer, the characters sometimes mask their viciousness with a face they call kindness. Not that the audience is ever deceived that the so-called kindness is anything but cowardice and concealment.

This is also a play with language that could make the characters in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross blush. In a touchstone scene in Closer, Dan (pretending to be Anna) and Larry meet in an Internet sex chat room with the language as nasty and actions as you would expect. The explicit language and verbal brutality doesn’t end in the chat room, however.

None of the four characters is very sympathetic or likeable. All of them brutalize each other in the name of intimacy and love. They chase their impulses with a complete disregard for ethics and an unwillingness to do any of the work that makes a relationship succeed. In the interest of being “cosmopolitan,” thy kiss and tell, thus destroying the opportunity for real intimacy and healthy relationships. There is no intimate detail that is safe with these lovers. All that matters are their own needs, their own griefs, and their own emotions. They are narcissistic in the extreme. If their physical and emotional needs aren’t being met—even for a moment, they look for the quickest way to hurt the partner they are currently with. Sex is used as part of a manipulative game.

Closer is a play that works despite (or perhaps because of) its brutality. It is a play that forces you to ask questions about relationships, to identify the flaws in these frail human beings and to question which flaws you yourself possess. It paints a bleak picture of relationships in part because it must encapsulate so much for dramatic purposes. The play takes place over four and a half years, showing us only the critical turning points in these people’s lives. The exaggeration of mistakes and failures do nothing to detract from the play’s power. Instead, it focuses the issues.

Patrick Marber, a London playwright, earned himself much critical acclaim with this offering. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play, the Olivier Award for Best New Play, the London Critics Circle Award for Best Play, and the Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy. I’ll confess I’m slightly appalled that it won as a comedy, even if there were scenes that were terribly funny.

I watched this play several months ago and recently read the script. I normally shy away from plays that are this verbally violent, but I found myself impressed with it. IT was provoking enough that my husband and I spent several hours discussing it with the director. It was one of those plays that had such depth and complexity that it could fuel such lengthy discussions and still leaving you feel as though there was much material left to plumb.

I’m not sure the script alone would have impressed me as deeply. It was that vaunted subtext that made the play come alive. It was the tones of voice and expressions performed by actors who had spent several weeks exploring the play’s meaning that delivered the sucker punch and kept the play from becoming pornographic.

Closer brings home the message that true intimacy means protecting your current mate from your past relationships, that holding back lurid details is a form of honesty and integrity, and that sex really can mean something other than physical sensations.