Digital and analog collide in sexy play
Central story and peculiar chemistry of characters will keep you watching
Sex with Strangers is the title of both American playwright Laura Eason’s dramatic two-hander and her character Ethan’s best-selling book about his sexual adventures, based on his super-popular blog.
It’s also (spoiler alert) what happens soon after Ethan meets frustrated novelist Olivia at an isolated Michigan writers’ retreat. The sex is frequent and hot — but discreet — in the seductive performances at the heart of Aaron Craven’s thought-provoking Mitch and Murray Productions staging at Studio 16.
The play deals with some highbrow issues involving literature, publishing and writer’s anxiety. But its primary concern is the interface between the online realm and the world of flesh and blood.
How these two characters negotiate their lives, careers and relationship offline and on makes for an entertaining and unpredictable, if not always entirely credible, evening of theatre.
Markian Tarasiuk’s hunky, fast-talking Ethan keeps us on our toes well into the second act, wondering if this Jekylland-Hyde figure will turn out to be a fraud, a liar, or even a dangerous psychopath.
Ethan insists that his internet
persona and authorial pseudonym “Ethan Strange” isn’t really him. Yes, he bet a friend that he could have sex with a different woman every week for a year. Yes, he posted the results in graphic detail, getting a million hits a month on his blog. And he admits to Olivia that his blog and book humiliate those women in terrible gross ways.
But he also argues that the women actively revel in the online notoriety, even posting their own versions of the sex. Besides, that’s all past, and anyway it’s just entertainment. In the here-and-now he has completely fallen for Olivia and would never hurt or betray her. He wants only to help her career and have a “real” relationship with her.
Olivia might be more skeptical if she weren’t so needy. A decade older than 20-something Ethan and analog to his digital, she doesn’t hesitate to become his latest stranger. She hangs in with him even after discovering that he’s not entirely what he claims.
She loves the sex and his intoxication with her writing. But the key attraction may be his online publishing prowess, which can help revive her failed first novel and ensure that her new manuscript gets published.
Loretta Walsh gives Olivia as much dimension and almost as much ambiguity as Tarasiuk’s Ethan. Alternately compelled and appalled by him, Olivia will get what she needs professionally and maybe personally through their connection. At one point he even accuses her of using him, just like those other girls.
The script’s second act reversals and surprises don’t always compute, and John R. Taylor’s sets confused me when the location switches from the retreat to a Chicago apartment. But the central story and the characters’ peculiar chemistry kept me fully engaged.
■ Postscript: Without inflating the significance of this play or trivializing the horror of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, I couldn’t help thinking about Ethan’s online avatar when reading about the killer. A raving, genocidal racist online, he apparently seemed a quiet, relatively normal reallife guy. Until he turned real life into racist mass murder.