Sexuality, artistry come together in 'The Blue Room'

First things first: It's not your grandfather's "The Blue Room" you'll be seeing on the Hippodrome stage. Remember the Rodgers and Hart song, "We'll have a blue room, a new room for two room, where every day's a holiday because you're married to me"? That quaint, romantic "Blue Room" belongs to 1927. 

Today's "Blue Room" is David Hare's sex-charged adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's "La Ronde," which scandalized the public in its original 1921 version. (The Vienna police closed it down and Schnitzler was prosecuted for obscenity.) The play was made into an inoffensive movie in 1950. Then, a few years ago, Hare re-worked Schnitzler for the current version which caused a stir in its London run, with Nicole Kidman and her brief nude scene. 
The Hippodrome's "The Blue Room" makes no compromises with Hare's tongue-in-cheek depiction of men and women caught in an ongoing search for sexual satisfaction, a search that ultimately leads to emptiness. The play is cleverly constructed, with just two actors playing five characters each, each seducing, each being seduced. 

Beautiful and talented Joy Schiebel plays a tart, an au pair, a wife, and an actress. Her equally talented co-star, Jason Marr, plays a cab driver, a student, a husband, a playwright and a politician. Within Mihai Ciupe's brilliant ice-blue set with its twin revolving doors, the two come together and come apart, each assuming different distinct identities, changing accents, intonations and body posture. (Marilyn Wall-Asse's costumes perfectly complement their quick-change artistry.)

Under Lauren Caldwell's direction, the production moves like clockwork. In fact, each sexual act is precisely timed and upon its conclusion, its duration is announced. The intertwining of the various couples has a clinical, remote quality. The sex in "The Blue Room" is joyless. 
The question might be asked as to whether Hare's goal was to create an audience of voyeurs. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the nudity in the show is never gratuitous, and because it lacks erotic feeling, most likely isn't a turn-on for audiences. What point does Hare make with his chain of dissatisfied lovers? Ultimate rejection? The inability of men and women to make commitments? The sameness of the sexual act leading to dissatisfaction? Hare touches on all these elements in his stylized game of sexual musical chairs.

"The Blue Room" runs for approximately 90 minutes without intermission. It has a dynamic rock music sound design by Graham Johnson that's like a slap in the face between scenes. Robert P. Robins keeps the lights low for the various couplings. Schiebel and Marr themselves move the props. 
It's a tour de force by this couple who not only can do it all, but bare it all.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Independent Florida Alligator  January 18, 2001

The Blue Room' shows the ups and downs of the old in-and-out ... by jessica arnold

I was bloody randy before the show even started … the show being "The Blue Room," David Hare's sexy, modern-day adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's "La Ronde," an 1896 commentary on sexual relations behind closed doors. As the Hipp filled to its max capacity, a collective "randy-ness" pervaded the audience as they awaited this salacious sexual romp. 

In "La Ronde," Schnitzler lays bare a circular series of sexual sketches which brings characters together in a tangled web. Although deemed immoral by the government, this commentary on the trail of sexual liaisons between the classes was still performed in small circles of Schnitzler's friends and associates, marking its territory as underground theater. Hare's adaptation places this lascivious daisy chain of sexual encounters in modern day and calls attention to shared melancholic longing and complacency that each of the characters possess. It is this longing that propels these characters to forego rationality and morality, and look to primal, instinctual sex to fill their respected voids. 

The play literally says instead of does. Revolving around the issue of sex, the scenes explore how we as humans get there, what we do to get it and what happens after the deed.The play reflects the human condition. Sex happens, and it will always happen. Unfortunately, it is the not the act per se which is the end-all-be-all, but the game we play in order to attain it. Ten scenes comprise the whole, in which the focus is on the human dynamic of foreplay, the discourse that leads to intercourse, the dance before the kiss, the hunt before the kill. It was interesting in the sense that it was like watching a cultural anthropological documentary on the sexual mating habits of the frustrated human animal, but unfortunately, with each scene following the same structural template, the show on a whole never came to a climax. Instead of a traditional narrative with a clear-cut beginning, middle and end, this piece mirrored life and the continuous cycle of repetitive events. 

In the Hipp production, two actors, Joy Schiebel and Jason Marr, played the slew of characters with an incredible chemistry and comic timing. Unfortunately, it seemed the female roles were somewhat bland in characterization when compared with the male counterpart. This wasn't necessarily a reflection of Schiebel's performance, but of the writing itself. Perhaps the wordy discourse is the culprit and not the actors themselves. Nevertheless, Joy's energy, spunkiness and beauty make her characters work, with one minor exception: a badly executed French au pair accent. Or was it Russian? 

"The Blue Room" is like an excruciatingly long masturbation session: It sounds good, but this session had no climax and, like its characters, one might leave feeling unfulfilled and frustrated.