STAGE REVIEW : ‘Defense’: Check Your Mate

In the art of seduction, never underestimate the power of talk, observes one of the characters in “Alekhine’s Defense,” at South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage. Words can be more persuasive than caresses.

Robert Daseler’s play proves the point. It’s words, words, words, with only a few strategically placed caresses, yet it generates considerable erotic tension.

The romantic triangle here consists of two co-workers (Julie Fulton and Robert Sicular), fellow bureaucrats in a county schools office, and the woman’s husband (Don Took), a research librarian. These are the sort of people whose romantic entanglements seldom get much attention on stage or screen--unless it’s for the sake of a lampoon. But Daseler treats their wayward hearts with respect.

At least he does so for two-thirds of his triangle. We understand why June is attracted to her colleague Alan and vice versa. What we don’t understand is why she’s married to Hal.

Hal doesn’t appear until the end of the first act, by which time Alan has taken advantage of a massive head start in terms of winning over the audience as well as June. After work one Friday, June has invited him to her suburban Southland tract house for dinner, and they’re having drinks on the patio while waiting for Hal to join them. Alan makes his moves--mostly verbal--on June. June lightly resists in order to make a few moves of her own on Alan.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the metaphor here is from chess; Alexander Alekhine was a grandmaster from early in the century whose “Defense” was “an asymmetrical response to standard openings which has substantial surprise value,” to quote the program notes of dramaturge Jerry Patch.

The metaphor itself doesn’t have much surprise value, in the wake of “Chess,” the musical. But in contrast with “Chess,” it’s used here with a degree of subtlety befitting the game.

During the first act, no one mentions chess, but we do notice that Alan and June pursue each other around the big squares that appear in the cement of the patio. And Alan’s parrying, in particular, has an asymmetrical quality that initially catches June by surprise.

She has learned how to respond by the end of that first act, however, and her citing her marriage to Hal as a rebuff to Alan appears to have something behind it, despite her obvious attraction to Alan. When Hal arrives, we look forward to a tough, evenly matched game in the second act.

Hal and Alan actually play chess in the second half, and Hal purports to teach Alan about Alekhine’s Defense, in the course of winning the game. But in the battle for June, Hal isn’t much of a competitor.

He’s so aggressively sour and cynical, and condescending to June, who is 15 years his junior, that it’s hard to understand how the two ever got together. By this time, we have heard detailed accounts of June and Alan’s previous marriages, but we hear virtually nothing about how the most important marriage in the play, Hal and June’s, began.

Hal’s choleric wisecracks elicit the play’s biggest laughs, but we’re laughing at him more than with him. As played by Took and tweedily costumed by Sylvia Vega-Vasquez, Hal doesn’t figure strongly in the romance of the play, and the second act isn’t the harrowing and scintillating battle of wits and affections that one might expect.

Still, as directed by Eli Simon, the sparks between Fulton’s June and Sicular’s Alan keep flickering throughout the evening. With her unassuming yet deceptively steely air, Fulton smartly embodies the Southern California woman, out to remake her identity yet again (at 31, June is already on her third marriage). Alan too is ready for a new beginning, and Sicular’s voice and eyes are seductive enough to get Alan what he wants, if not to keep it.

Daseler’s dialogue takes plenty of lively little excursions that are more pertinent than they appear at first. It’s refreshing to hear this kind of talk from Southern California suburbanites, so often maligned as inarticulate or mindless, and Peter Maradudin’s lighting of Cliff Faulkner’s patio makes one wonder why more suburbanites don’t while away their evenings in the fading light, playing romantic games with each other and imagining the future.