A Clever Discourse on Love’s Glories

Since 1986, in various forms and many cities, a collective known as the Modern Artists Company has had its merry way with “Plato’s Symposium.” That feast of language, devoted to the erotic and philosophic glories of love, returned in an abridged staged-reading edition, part of the Getty Center’s Friday night performance series.

Plato would’ve liked it. Paul Schmidt, responsible for some of the best Chekhov translations on the planet, has fashioned an English-language take on “Symposium” at once fluid and cleverly contemporary.

Agathon (Christopher Bradley) has just won the annual Lenaea drama competition and is hosting an august gathering in his own honor. Socrates (Tony Abatemarco), Aristophanes (Jason Reed) and others drink and, at Socrates’ behest, take turns expounding on the meaning of love.

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In Schmidt’s version, the events of the night are relayed by the caterer, Aristodemos (Michael Caldwell) working the party. Center stage, on a floor laden with white flowers, the caterer’s boyfriend (Robert Porch) listens, rapt, in the present. We hear the men’s stories as he does.

Some of the riffs and updates are on the easy side. Early on, the friends and ex-lovers sing a bit of Sondheim, for example. Even so, such bits came and went with admirable grace in director David Schweizer’s staging.

Rhythmically, this 90-minute version faltered near the end, partly because Socrates’ ode to love never was Plato’s best stuff. But Schweizer and company captured an essential component of “Symposium’s” charm. At its core it is a plaintive work. It ends on an ineffable dying chord, as the hangovers begin to disperse and the new day dawns. (That bittersweet quality comes through in Mark Bennett’s excellent original score, which he played on a white baby grand.)

Though told in the past tense, “Symposium” looks forward, and will always. After all: Will there ever be a time when we won’t need Plato’s reminder (via translator Schmidt) that a society is best off being “neither completely repressive nor completely out of control”?