Closer
Yay, publicity.
`the darker side of to love'
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Special to the Gazette
There's a whole lot of 'I' in "Closer".
The Patrick Marber play, opening Friday as a KnockAbout Theatre Company production in the Epic Center Theatre, studies a sort of love parallelogram of betrayal that develops between four selfish, "damaged" 20-and-30-somethings in London. The ultimate undoing of each, according to one of the show's stars -- Christopher DeYoung -- is ultimately the selfish absorption rampant in human nature. "He studied the script for three years, he should know," said co-star Richard Steward.
As a teaching assistant for a directing class at Western Michigan University, where he studied theater performance, DeYoung took part in a character-analysis breakdown of the "Closer" script. The following semester, it fell on DeYoung's shoulders to teach from the script because the professor he was working with took leave. After that, "I kept reading it. ... I'm still finding little things that I've never noticed before that give you hints into the characters' lives and the situations.
"There's always a darker side to people and there's always a darker side to love," DeYoung said of "Closer," which inspired the Oscar-nominated 2004 film of the same name.
"This play has to do with the deception of love. My character in particular -- I don't think he knows who he is at this point in the play (the beginning of Act I). That's why he feels like he needs someone else in his life to validate his experience."
He finds that "someone" in Alice, a former stripper who becomes the muse for Dan's debut novel. She's mysterious, beautiful and completely dependent upon him. But then enters the sophisticated photographer Anna, who's shooting the portraits for the cover sleeve of Dan's novel, and his character's head is immediately turned.
"It's like he's standing in a grocery store, and there are all these lines," DeYoung said. "You think, `That one's moving faster now,' so you go to that one."
At a recent rehearsal, director Lisa Marie Dorgan pointed out emphasis in nearly every other line that gives clues to the characters' motivations.
"All of them play with words," Dorgan said. "All of them lie, they cheat. These four people are sociopaths, and sociopaths are pretty good with manipulating words."
The four characters, played by DeYoung, Steward, Kim Krane and Amber Hunt, utilize different tools -- coquettishness for one, sophistication for another, sexuality for another -- to manipulate others in a play whose cover describes its subject as the "life-imitates-MTV superficiality of modern urban existence."
Ironically, it's the character whose profession seems most lurid -- the former stripper Alice -- who's the most sympathetically drawn. "I like my character because she seems human," said Krane, who plays Alice. "I see faults in Alice, but I see faults in myself, too."
The actors said they hope "Closer" will make people think, as did the film, which many movie-goers came away from not knowing how they felt. Three days later, they still weren't sure.
"I hope that's kind of what we give everybody," Steward said.
"It's going to make people look at themselves and how they are in relationships and with other people," Hunt said. "It'll spark debates."
Closer -- 8 pm August 26-27, Sept. 2-3, 9-10
Epic Center Theatre, 359 S. Burdick St.
808-3184, Knockabout's Website
Comeseeitcomeseeitcomeseeit.
Shamelessly cross-posted to my journal.