Friday, November 07, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Live theater is all about the here and now. But in the glory of the living moment, we can miss the larger rhythms of theatrical life cycles, in which individuals and institutions ebb and flow, grow and change.

	'CLOSER' Where: Quantum Theatre at mezzanine level, Jackman Building, 6th & Penn Ave., Downtown. When: Through Nov. 23; Wed. -Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 5:30 & 9 p.m.; Sun. 8 p.m. Tickets: $20; 412-394-3353. 'COPENHAGEN' Where: PICT at Henry Heymann Theatre, Stephen Foster Memorial, Oakland. When: Through Nov. 23; Tues. through Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m.; also 2 p.m. Nov.15; no perf. Nov. 13 (at Washington & Jefferson College that night). Tickets: $25-$30, students $15; 412-394-3353.

Witness Quantum and PICT, two vigorous small professional theater companies currently breaking out of summer mode, risking growth. Quantum Theatre, founded in 1990, is mid-way through its first year-round, four-play subscription season. Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre, founded in 1996, is one step behind, risking an added fall show in anticipation of extending next year's four-play subscription season into the fall. And tonight, each opens a play by a hot English playwright that recently made waves in London and New York.

Quantum's play is "Closer," a dark, taught, pacey comedy of two couples in overlapping sexual pursuit, written by Patrick Marber, 39. Originally a writer and performer of stand-up comedy, Marber scored his first big success with "Dealer's Choice" (1995), where the arena of battle is poker. In "Closer" (1997), it's sex, but the play is really about human relationships and the primal darkness within.

PICT's play is "Copenhagen," a taut intellectual puzzle about the origins of the atomic bomb, written by Michael Frayn, 70. Originally a columnist and novelist, Frayn began writing plays in 1970 with a flop -- he is supposed to have been spat at by audience members -- but he scored big in 1982 with his hit backstage farce, "Noises Off," and then in 1998 with the very different "Copenhagen." The area of conflict in "Copenhagen" is physics, but the true subject is human relationships and the darkness in the human soul.

As befits a senior playwright with skills both comic and tragic, Frayn has done feeling adaptations from Chekhov, where motives always run deep. As befits a fiercer, younger playwright, Marber has updated Strindberg's "Miss Julie" to World War II England, intensifying the tensions of class and sex.

Marber's young career is on the rise, embroiled as he is now in the imminent A-list filming of "Closer" with a cast of Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen, directed by Mike Nichols. But Frayn is also flying high, with a powerful new play, "Democracy," just opened in London and almost certainly on its way to Broadway in the spring.

Introducing Pittsburgh to these recent international hits are two theaters serving different aesthetics. Quantum's founder, Karla Boos, who is directing "Closer," prefers vivid, often off-beat young playwrights, when she isn't doing Shakespeare or adapted classics. PICT founding artistic director Andrew Paul mixes Western classics (Sheridan, Wilde, Chekhov) with recent Irish work (Friel, Murphy, Carr), but he is willing to stretch his mandate to admit modern plays that use literate language to explore universal issues.

Quantum's signature, of course, is to choose a different and unconventional venue to fit each play. So the bitter modernity of "Closer" will be framed by a gritty, modernist parking garage in the Cultural District. In contrast, PICT has just adopted a new home at Pitt's Stephen Foster Memorial, where "Copenhagen" benefits from the intimacy of the small Henry Heymann Theatre.

Both companies are taking a risk. For PICT, it's financial. "Copenhagen" was a solid artistic and intellectual success when originally staged three months ago. By squeezing in extra chairs, it sold 102 percent for the run but turned many away in the final week; hence this revival with the same director (Gregory Lehane) and cast (Larry John Meyers, Darren Eliker and Mary Rawson). Still, PICT has never before chanced a three-week run without a subscription base. "Copenhagen" must survive on single ticket sales driven by admiring word of mouth from the summer, hoping also to draw college students who weren't around for the first run.

Quantum's risk comes from the frankness of "Closer's" comic but perverse sexuality. Boos has alerted subscribers to its very adult content. Directing a foursome of John Shepard, Laurie Klatscher, Tom Schaller and Erika Cuenca, she has to deal with issues and practices that, as she joked in a recent e-mail, "I can't even write about because I haven't had enough therapy yet."

Still, Quantum's audience has come to trust Boos' judgment. It knows she will take them to a different place, both literally and theatrically, and show them something theatrically new. PICT has the harder task of attracting a new audience, since most of its subscribers already saw "Copenhagen" last summer.

Those who see both plays will discover wildly different works that share a common mode of insistent exploration. In plumbing the intricacies of physics and memory, "Copenhagen" splits the atom of personality to confront the central human darkness it calls Elsinore, after the existential anguish of Hamlet. In following a carousel of predatory sex, the more assaultive "Closer" discovers that same darkness.

Both move from the personal to the cosmic. The fate of humanity depends on the physics and motives at stake in "Copenhagen," but the implications of the human physics of "Closer" are no less far-reaching. Both plays are about betrayal. Both discover surprising comedy. Both jump forward and backward in time, assuming the active intelligence of their audience. And both do all this with the simplest means: A small nucleus of skilled actors exploring the drama of the living moment.

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