SCR IN SINGAPORE : ‘Frankie and Johnny’ Tries to Connect in Far East : Theater: South Coast Repertory ends its first international tour with the Terrence McNally bedroom drama. At least one member of the audience says its subject matter is too explicit.

Novelist E.M. Forster’s famous dictum about life and art--”only connect”--might have been the catch phrase for South Coast Repertory’s first international tour, which ended here Thursday with “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.”

Making a connection was not merely the essential theme of Terrence McNally’s poignant bedroom drama about a pair of desperate middle-aged lovers but also the most palpable question surrounding the production itself: Could a short-order cook from Brooklyn and a waitress from Manhattan who are trying to connect with each other also make the connection with an audience halfway around the world?

At the very least, the show mounted on the proscenium stage of the 326-seat Drama Centre--the smallest of the Singapore Festival of Arts venues--had two remarkable actors going for it. Karen Hensel and Richard Doyle reprised their roles from the three-quarter-round version seen last fall at SCR’s 161-seat Second Stage.

Doyle--having dispelled exaggerated fears about a chronic back problem with his poised and fluid performance last week in Shaw’s “You Never Can Tell”--gave as potent, textured and physical a portrayal of Johnny as he ever gave in Costa Mesa.

Hensel matched him moment for bittersweet moment as Frankie, in some ways the more difficult role because it demands the same humor and the same sensitivity but also a less transparent, less dazzling emotional surface.

“Frankie and Johnny” begins in the dark with the whimpers and groans of a bed-rattling orgasm, graduates into the light with brief moments of partial nudity, and rolls on with a lusty, intermittent flow of sexually explicit language.

At the same time, it is a sentimental pas de deux full of psychological pirouettes romanticized by the moonlight slanting through the alley into Frankie’s cramped Hell’s Kitchen apartment. When you hear music on the radio, it is the unlikely but deliberate strains of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” and Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”

What an audience will make of any play is always a matter of speculation. This time, however, it seemed especially unpredictable because of the sexual subject matter and the level of intimate candor in Warner Shook’s presentation. The Singapore theatergoing public, for all of its apparent Westernization, is unaccustomed to such exposure. The authorities don’t allow it. Nor would the playgoers’ own sense of propriety.

“I can tell you one thing,” said Connie Chu, a 19-year-old junior college student. “If my mother knows that I watched this play, and if she knows the contents of this play, she is surely not going to ever let me see another play again.”

Chu said she preferred SCR’s production of Shaw’s “You Never Can Tell,” which ran at the Victoria Theatre. That turn-of-the-century comic romance hewed more closely to the “light-hearted entertainment” Chu said she expects from a play.

Although she conceded having been touched by “Frankie and Johnny,” she nonetheless insisted, firmly but politely, that it is “a bit too unconventional for Singapore.”

Chu’s sort of reaction did not surprise 27-year-old Ivan Heng, one of the leading actors on the island republic. “For many people, I am sure it is the first time they see nudity on the stage,” he said.

Heng, who starred earlier this year in the title role of David Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” during its four-month run in Bombay and Madras, India, had nothing but praise for both SCR and McNally’s play.

“I think they have opened a few eyes in Singapore,” he said. “The play was very ‘today.’ And they did it very sensitively.”

At least one member of the audience, however, thought the play old hat. “It’s a little like the me generation,” scoffed Indra Nadarajah, a festival official. “We’ve heard all about sex and sexual freedom for the past 10 or 15 years. And they’re agonizing over it still.”

On top of that, many of the references didn’t come across, she said, because they were too American for the audience. Nadarajah had a point. Several guaranteed one-liners didn’t draw the slightest giggle.

Nevertheless, if SCR has learned anything besides the logistical strain of mounting a tour, it is the value of playing to a fresh audience. The troupe has catered to the same subscribers in Orange County for so long, one SCR member quipped, that it has forgotten what a live audience is like.

And until you’ve heard the warm sound of a Singaporean audience enjoying itself--as happened with “You Never Can Tell”--you are missing what intelligent verve sounds like.

Perhaps it was symbolic that the only people to leave “Frankie and Johnny” at the intermission on opening night were a couple from Chino, Calif., that had won the trip to Singapore in an SCR raffle.

They had connected, but not, apparently, with the play.