TV Reviews : ‘Life Under Water’ Barely Manages to Stay Afloat

Broken love affairs along the beaches in the East Hamptons are the stuff of languid torpor in “Life Under Water” on “American Playhouse” tonight (9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15).

The production is soporific, and the privileged characters are self-absorbed and unsympathetic. The five characters seem to move in a void and the show’s rhythm is aimless. Watching “Life Under Water” creates the odd sensation of swimming under water.

Director Jay Holman’s alternating close-ups and sunny, lush, seaside vistas are an intelligent approach to the literary material, but there’s no dramatic tension. Playwright Richard Greenberg’s adaptation of his one-act play, although scenically liberated with shots of gleaming beach houses and turquoise pools, still suggests a fable for the jaded that can work only as live theater.

The doomed romances are generational, beginning with a fling between a divorced mother (Joanna Gleason) and an insufferable bounder (an unctuous, sardonic portrait by Stephen McHattie). The more melancholy and meaningful affair is between the mother’s searching, disenchanted 20-year old son (Keanu Reeves) and a cloudy, troubled girl who lives down the beach (an unfocused performance by Sarah Jessica Parker).

The most spoiled of the bunch is a bored, rich snot of a redhead (the vivid Haviland Morris) who lounges on the beach saying terrible things and who plays too many games to need an affair.

The dialogue even enlists the service of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s green light at the end of Gatsby’s dock. But nobody beats against the tide here. They just stare out to sea. Except that redhead--the worst of the lot will have her day.