STAGE REVIEW : Chilling Ground of ‘Secret Rapture’

R apture seems an unlikely term with which to associate the majority of the venal, weak, self-centered characters in David Hare’s “The Secret Rapture” at South Coast Repertory. The word is not used in the scuba diving sense, as in rapture of the deep, although spiritual euphoria is part of the mystery Hare attempts to evoke. As he explains it, “The ‘secret rapture’ is that moment at which a nun expects to be united with Christ. In other words, it’s death.”

If that sends a shiver through you, it should. A kind of chill stalks “The Secret Rapture” from the moment light slices through blackout as a woman nervously opens a door and is startled to find her sister sitting in the dark room. Their father has died; his body is on the bed. Lives will be changed, not by the event of death, which is only a trigger, but by the forces of interpersonal and public politics that will rush in to fill the void.

Hare has not made a secret of his fascination with how larger societal forces shape our private ends. He tackled that notion in “Plenty,” a psychological dissection of post-World War II England seen through the collapse of one woman. In “Rapture,” he has taken the fallout of Thatcherism and created an unlikely morality play through the secular canonization of another.

Of the sisters mentioned earlier, Marion (Bairbre Dowling) is a junior minister in a hidebound conservative government while Isobel (Caroline Goodall) is an artist. They have only one thing in common: their late father’s widow, Katherine (Libby Boone), a much younger woman, alcoholic and incapable of coping responsibly. She becomes their unequally shared responsibility.

Isobel loves, lives and works with Irwin (Simon Templeman), another artist with whom she ekes out a contented living. She is interior, tender, idealistic. Marion is exterior, self-righteous and, by her own eventual admission, incapable of feeling (“I don’t have the right equipment”). She is married to Tom (Hal Landon Jr.), a born milquetoast and born-again Baptist who heads something called Christians in Business.

The road to destruction is subtle, even if Hare’s play isn’t always. First Marion allows Katherine to inflict herself on Isobel. Later Marion and Tom in a “Christian” desire to “help,” bedevil Isobel’s and Irwin’s life with self-serving temptations that alter chemistries and wreak ultimate chaos.

The play, which achieves this with uneven success, ends with a tortured epiphany that won’t bear repeating. “Secret Rapture” is not about plot or cause, but about effect. It’s about the malice of weakness and the powerlessness of strength. It’s about currents and resistance, humanity and honor. In short, it is dangerous, difficult stuff. After such plays as “Speed-the-Plow,” “Serious Money,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Palladium Is Moving” and even “Other People’s Money,” “The Secret Rapture” is, as Hare himself recognizes, an attempt “to buck the trend. Unfashionably,” says he, “I have a heroine.”

And then some. Under David Emmes’ spare and precise direction, the production at SCR is a part of Orange County’s ongoing Festival of Britain. The design team and the cast are a hands-across-the-sea mixer, with the excellent Goodall and Templeman hailing from England, along with set designer Robert Jones, whose supply of ever-changing, meticulously detailed locales would seem to defy the logistics of storage and wing space.

Boone is a vibrant manic-depressive as Katherine, and Dowling’s Marion is shrill and obnoxious enough in her tailored suits to conjure up the inevitable associations. Elizabeth Dennehy provides some entertaining man-eating moments as her shallow assistant Rhonda, while Landon’s apologetic piety and limpness seem a loaded act of perpetual self-erasure. But the play pivots around the complex Isobel and, only because he is so inextricably the instrument of her fate, around Irwin. Templeman manages to embody weakness with plenty of presence, while Goodall’s generous and inviting Isobel thoroughly eludes self-pity.

This is a play destined to arouse polemics, but it is curious to recall that it did so earlier this year for the wrong reasons, when Hare challenged New York Times critic Frank Rich to a duel of words after Rich reacted negatively to the New York production Hare had directed. Rich declined, but the furor persisted--unfortunately so. The play deserves to be talked about not for its Rich review, but for the richness of its content.