Only Skin-Deep

Sometimes a play about sex is just a play about sex. Case in point: David Hare’s “The Blue Room,” which caused a stir on both sides of the Atlantic several years ago, mostly because of the marquee status it accorded Nicole Kidman’s bare bum.

But, at least in the L.A. premiere production that’s vamping around the Pasadena Playhouse these days, “The Blue Room” offers little to get hot and bothered about, unless perhaps you’re a male reviewer on the far side of adolescence (“Pure theatrical Viagra,” one London critic labeled it). What makes “The Blue Room” disappointing, finally, isn’t that its mix-and-match fornications lack heat, but that its conception lacks freshness and specificity, and its dialogue is surprisingly short on wit and dramatic punch. “The Blue Room” scores a few rounds below the belt, but it’s pretty much dead above the waist.

That’s a pity, because the play’s theatrical pedigree held lip-smacking possibilities. Based on a series of sexually themed sketches by fin de siecle Viennese scribe Arthur Schnitzler, and adapted by Max Ophuls as the landmark 1950 film “La Ronde,” Hare’s sort-of-updated version probes the nature of male-female relations in a shadowy dreamscape of modern urban anomie.

Among the most humane, intelligent and politically astute of contemporary English-speaking playwrights, Hare would seem to have been the ideal man for the job. In previous works such as “Plenty” and the superb “Skylight,” he has demonstrated an unusual capacity to write gripping character dramas that embody deeper social, and even moral, conflicts.

But while the 10 characters in “The Blue Room,” played by just two quick-changing actors, Arabella Field and Lenny Von Dohlen, offer an occasional peek at psychological depth, they remain stubbornly two-dimensional and archetypal, and the performers seldom manage to rise above the shallow material they’ve been given. Neither does David Schweizer’s aggressively stylized direction bring emotional credibility to a play that badly needs it, if the audience is to feel something more than a kind of smirky, detached superiority.

Conveying a suitably claustrophobic feel, the 90-minute intermissionless production unspools against Christopher Acebo’s boxy set design, an all-purpose, three-walled configuration where furniture (mostly beds and other horizontal devices) slithers on and off, and Geoff Korf’s noir-ish lighting bathes the various couplings in melancholy tones. The set’s most expressive feature, at stage left and right, are his and hers changing rooms, where the actors disappear between scenes while donning new clothes and assuming new characters as casually as they swap lovers.

Following Schnitzler’s original concept, “The Blue Room” observes a round-robin string of affairs involving a more or less interchangeable cast of people from all walks of life. A cabdriver couples with a young girl, then seduces a ditsy au pair in the back room of a nightclub. The au pair then has a quickie with a young student, who implausibly shambles around in short pants and bites his fingernails. The student beds down a conservative Dixie politician’s wife. The politician subsequently cuts loose with a 17-year-old model, who’s fallen under the spell of a pompous playwright. And so on.

Emphasizing the adversarial, even brutal nature of these erotic encounters, each scene is punctuated by a clanging bell, like the rounds of a boxing match. Above the stage, a screen flashes the elapsed time, from a shameful “0 Seconds” to a Kama Sutran two hours, 20 minutes. By invoking these theatrical tropes, “The Blue Room” seeks to equate sexual activity with performance, as lovers project their delusional needs and wishes onto each other. “Are you acting?” the playwright pointedly asks his actress paramour in one of the sharpest written and best realized scenes, a verbal jousting match that suggests a post-Playboy version of Noel Coward’s “Private Lives.”

The sophisticated satirical sensibility of this scene, and another involving the playwright and the young model (which includes the production’s longest stretch of sustained nudity) contrasts sharply with the shrill, almost farcical antics of the earlier vignettes. And Field and Von Dohlen bring a sublime comic pathos to the drug-addled interlude between the hypocritical politician and the young model. But in the majority of scenes, the production opts for a type of over-the-top, pret-a-porter attitudinizing that reduces the characters to cutouts.

More crucially, what’s missing from these mostly joyless gropings is a contemporary social backdrop that would lend relevance to an essentially turn-of-the-century scenario. Schnitzler’s implication was that all this frenzied libidinal activity constituted a form of political subversion, that sex, along with its ugly handmaiden, venereal disease, had become the great leveler in society. He was concerned with what his contemporary and admirer Sigmund Freud identified as the struggle between eros and thanatos, the sexual urge and the death wish, as it played out between lovers and within cultures.

What “The Blue Room” really could use is an id, a subtext that would make what was scandalous and prescient in 1900 seem equally provocative in 2002. By choosing to emphasize the universality of sexual betrayal and bad faith, “The Blue Room” casts itself adrift in time and place. The grab bag of American and British accents, and the periodic “thunk!” of dated references, like the aristocratic stage-door Johnnie in the penultimate scene, heightens the sense that neither the playwright nor the production has a strong sense of where it’s supposed to be.

You can’t really blame “The Blue Room” for wanting to have its cigar and smoke it too, to be timeless but timely, topical yet titillating. Who’d have thought those desires, and a playwright of passionate ability, could produce a work of such full-frontal tameness?

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“The Blue Room,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5, 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2, 7 p.m. Ends April 21. $29.50-$44.50. (626) 356-7529. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Arabella Field...Female characters

Lenny Von Dohlen...Male characters

Written by David Hare. Directed by David Schweizer. Set by Christopher Acebo. Lighting by Geoff Korf. Costumes by Maggie Morgan. Sound by Stafford M Floyd. Stage manager Anna Belle Gilbert.