The New York Post
Monday, September 29, 1997
Take the 'Plunge'
Clive Barnes - Theater review
There is a special authenticity to authenticity which nothing else can really match-- it is that instantly perceptible quality letting a play or movie, if not define a generation, depict it, or at least reveal a major aspect of it.
This odd virtue-- better experienced than described-- could be felt in works as varied in style and quality as "Death of a Salesman," "Look Back in Anger," "Rebel Without a Cause," and "The Big Chill."
Now, there is no nastier an albatross that can be slung around the neck of an unsuspecting (or even suspecting) artist than to call him or her a spokesman for their generation. Yet I think that or something uncannily like that is what may be in store for Christopher Kyle, whose play "Plunge" dived into Playwrights Horizons last night.
Like his rightly much-praised earlier effort "The Monogamist," also given by Playwrights Horizons, "Plunge" deals with a group of 30-somethings, concentrating on their lives and lifestyles.
Interestingly, "Plunge" doesn't really have a story to tell. Things happen-- it would be an odd kind of play if they didn't. But what happens is not significant as narrative, but only in the light it casts on character.
This is a candid snapshot of a group of people-- a woman merchant banker following in the steps of her father, a couple of new parents with a marriage on the brink of collapse, a young man who is being forced to take up the Episcopalian priesthood or have his mother cease to support him, another young man who works on computers as an office temp and claims to be content to leave it that way.
They come together for a fraught country house weekend. Three of them were classmates at college, each one is sexually and/or emotionally intertwined with at least one other of the group, and they all face problems regarding career, love and money. Well, all except one.
For while this is a snapshot of a group, it eventually resolves itself into a single portrait, the portrait of the materialist as a young woman-- a portrait of Clare, the merchant banker, destructive, ruthlessly confident and insatiably self-centered. The one character ready and anxious to plunge.
Kyle's writing is niftily smart, and his dramatic ideas almost naughtily engaging-- from the cheekily unexpected sex-tricycle at the opening, to the savagely unexpected callousness of the ending, the intelligence is continuously diverted.
But diversion is not the name of the game-- Kyle is subversive in the objective way he impales his pretty butterflies like a thoughtful lepidopterist pandering to our museum pleasure.
Luckily this brilliant play has been given an equally brilliant production-- even the designs by Rob Odorisio (sets), Jennifer von Mayrhauser (costumes) and Donald Holder (lighting) could not be bettered, while the acting under Ron Lagomarsino's hair-trigger fluent direction, fits like a skin.
Ashley Crow as the aggressively assertive banker finds a wonderful match in the aggressively uncertain Jessica Hecht, a young wife who may be a lesbian and a do-gooder who needs money.
As for the men-- the edible males in this anthropomorphic insect world-- Taylor Nichols as a quintessential nerd-success, Frederick Weller as a young man outclassed and outplaced, and Bruce Norris as a cynic loser, all play their allotted parts beautifully in this cleverly calculated picture of a none too attractive seeming reality.
This is a play not to miss if you have any interest at all-- even a fearful one-- in the next millenium.
Playwrights Horizons, Anne G. Wilder Theater, 416 W. 42nd St., (212) 279-4200.