STAGE REVIEW : Danger’s Absent From Garden Grove’s ‘Liaisons’

Don’t tell us how you played the game. Did you win, or did you lose?

Toss good sportsmanship on the ash heap when you enter the ruthless world of Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” which, in 1986, British playwright Christopher Hampton adapted into a cunningly crafted drama.

Hampton’s mastery is only evident on repeat visits to his play, and Thomas F. Bradac’s production at the Grove Shakespeare Festival’s Gem Theatre in Garden Grove provides a new chance to take it in.

It’s a master’s play, though, without master players.

To get at the heart of Hampton’s De Laclos requires a paradoxical heartlessness, an exactitude of spirit like that of the Marquise de Merteuil. She is an intellectual in the business of clandestine affairs, always several steps ahead of pursuers and prey alike.

So, too, must the director of Hampton’s highly calibrated play, but Bradac is clearly not up to the task. He just as clearly has picked up the hint from the text that Merteuil (Karen Hensel) and her partner in (and ultimate victim of) love crimes, Valmont (Carl Reggiardo), are really playing chess, but with people’s lives. Cool and precision, though, can’t be allowed to transform into stiffness and near inertia. That’s the problem at the Gem.

Hensel, a good actress, is simply miscast; the result is a confused blandness. Merteuil, when she tells Valmont in the play’s key pronouncement that “I always knew I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own,” is all the more chilling for playing her hand so openly, so flagrantly. In Hensel’s hands, the chill is gone.

Reggiardo, who at his best can exude a snake-like charm, seems a natural for Valmont. But here, he is stiff where he should be plotting, pseudo-stentorian where he should be dramatic, speeding through his lines like a train off the rails. His Valmont sounds out of control long before he actually is. Nothing could be more fatal to a play about a man’s passions ever so gradually overcoming him.

When it happens, Reggiardo impressively reveals an inner desperation, but far too late in the game. Hampton’s points have long since been dulled by the production’s lack of rigorous examination of the rules that drove pre-revolutionary French aristocracy.

The supporting cast--especially Richard Soto’s Danceny, Nike Doukas’ emotionally whipsawed Tourvel, Jennifer Elise Cox’s Cecile--is generally steered toward an uninteresting middle range. E. Scott Shaffer’s drawing room set and Karen Weller’s costumes lack the ornate qualities of a culture about to consume itself, just as Chuck Estes’ muddy-sounding music never truly captures the right sinister note.