More Than Just the Bare Basics

All slobbering aside, the new David Hare import that opened last night at the Cort Theatre is . . . oh, what’s the use?

After London’s male critics went laughably gaga over a glimpse of Nicole Kidman’s naked backside, the BBC Radio reportedly did an entire program on the “drool factor” and Newsweek’s Kidman cover story declared “The Blue Room” the “hottest ticket for a nonmusical in Broadway history,” any attempt to shift focus to Hare’s adaptation of a 1900 Arthur Schnitzler play seems like the geezer joke about claiming to read Playboy for the interviews.

So, OK. Kidman looks lanky, nubile and spectacular. For the record, she reveals a bit of breast in addition to the aforementioned celebrity butt and otherwise simulates versatile sex for her 100-minute Broadway debut in the skin of five different modern women. What’s more, she can act. Kidman, who began her career back home in Australian theater before Hollywood got her, is emphatically a stage creature, a nervy talent with a dancer’s trust in her long, spiky body to nail powerful emotional complexities that her delicate features belie--and Hare’s unusually charmless script only occasionally suggests.

If it matters, this is not just one of the least important plays by England’s leading playwright of conscience, but, with his “Amy’s View” and his own solo stage vehicle, “Via Dolorosa,” also due this season, it’s easily his least personal available statement. It should surprise no one that the project came to him when Sam Mendes (whose Donmar Warehouse is also responsible for his smash “Cabaret” and David Leavitt’s hit “Electra”) asked him to write the Kidman showcase. Since she and husband Tom Cruise had been working in London for years on Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” an erotic movie reportedly inspired by another Schnitzler story, the turn-of-the-century Viennese playwright’s oft-adapted “Reigen” (a.k.a. “La Ronde”) seemed a smart choice.

So it has been a career-definer for her and not a shame for the theater. Aside from Kidman, this is pretty cold business for such a hot topic. Neither, however, is it just a stunt. Hare has compressed the daisy chain of sexual episodes into a two-actor play about five loveless, briefly passionate exchanges. Oh, yes, Kidman is not alone on the stage. Her co-star is Iain Glen, a competent but not especially versatile Scottish actor and Royal Shakespeare Company veteran, who does a full-frontal nude cartwheel and still can’t get the headlines.

This brings us back to the reason for the exercise. Kidman looks great in the micro-minis of a teen prostitute and a jail-bait model, the lace body stocking of a cheating politician’s wife, the silky slip of a stage diva and the baby-doll dress of a vixen French au pair. The dress is blue, as are the shiny walls that enclose most of the brief encounters in this roundelay with an accent on the last syllable. The sex is also blue, with an accent on the melancholy.

Mendes’ production is oddly mechanical, even considering the subtext of the empty affairs. With designer Mark Thompson, he has envisioned a room with neon outlines and faceless electronic music that both have the off-putting, moderne self-consciousness of the new United Airlines terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. The episodes are labeled with projected titles--”The Girl,” “The Politician,” etc. The sex is performed in blackout. At the end of each session, a projection tells us the amount of time it took, an initially amusing gimmick that wears out quicker than the fast sex.

For a while, we are engaged by the sight of Kidman after each blackout. When the lights go on after the first episodes, we are struck by her look of disappointment, the implied rancor in her splayed legs. As the women she plays get richer and in greater control of the sex, she seems happier, but, if a point is being made here, Mendes and Hare do not follow through with it.

What goes around comes around in Schnitzler’s original, so racy for its time that it was distributed only to his friends and, when finally staged, endured some of the theater’s more colorful riots. Schnitzler, a physician, was believed to be tracing syphilis along with his class-crossing adventurers. Hare does include a few mentions of the danger of sex today and Mendes gives the characters appropriate class accents, but, considering the artists involved, there is a surprising lack of social content.

Mostly, we’re here for a high-class theatrical striptease. For Hollywood voyeurs (tickets were scalped for $1,400 in London), there is the chance to watch Kidman be a raunchball, which she does with exquisite artistry and style. Anyone who has seen her movie breakthrough as the murderous weatherbunny in “To Die For” knows that Kidman is, far and away, more than the soft-focus girlie in Cruise’s films. Now Broadway knows it too.

* “The Blue Room.” David Hare’s adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s “La Ronde,” directed by Sam Mendes, with Nicole Kidman and Iain Glen. Sets and costumes by Mark Thompson, lights by Hugh Vanstone, music by Paddy Cunneen. Cort Theatre, 48th Street, east of Broadway, New York. Through March 7. Sold out.