Laura Eason’s ‘Sex with Strangers’ by PTC (1st review)

Ethan is a brash, immature, self-centered jerk who has achieved his aforementioned fame and fortune on the Internet by shamelessly blogging in extensive (and exaggerated) detail about his sexual conquests of myriad “dumbass loser sluts” and has now assembled his oeuvre into a wildly popular e-book. Olivia, by contrast, is an older and quieter woman who, much like Emily Dickinson, writes primarily for herself, cherishes her privacy, and loves the smell of old books; she regards blogging as the lowest form of literature.

Since there’s not much to do in this old house (even the Wi-Fi is down) and since this is the theater, you will not be surprised to learn that Ethan and Olivia spend the next few days canoodling on every conceivable piece of furniture and against at least one of the doors. But for Ethan, at least, Olivia’s body turns out to be easier to penetrate than her mind.

Ethan: “We did what we did last night, but you won’t let me read your book?”

Olivia: “It’s too personal.”

Clinton, Rendell, and Bush

When the incorrigible Ethan sneaks a look at Olivia’s manuscript anyway, he is transformed, feels the first stirrings of genuine emotion, and by the second act has written a serious novel that Olivia herself pronounces “really quite brilliant, and poetic, and haunting.” Conversely, when Olivia reads Ethan’s over-the-top braggadocio account of his sexual exploits, she is nauseated, despite Ethan’s attempts to reassure her that he’s just playing an authorial role and that “half of what people say about themselves [online] is bullshit.”

Now, Eason is definitely on to an original insight here. Over the past generation, arrested adolescence has become the norm among adult males, to the extent that otherwise sensible and mature women (like Olivia) often go belly-up (at least in the voting booth) for overgrown fraternity boys like Bill Clinton, Ed Rendell, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, and Ted Cruz. The Internet seems to have exacerbated this model: To feed his insatiable hunger for attention, Donald Trump used to expend gobs of energy courting tabloid gossip columnists; today all he has to do is tweet.

In many respects Ethan could be a stand-in for Trump. We are told that Ethan is 28, but (much like Trump) he possesses the emotional maturity of a 16-year-old. Also like Trump, and thanks to modern technology, Ethan requires only a few tools to pursue his superficial goals: his iPhone, his member, and an arrogance that (as Olivia puts it) “knows no limits.”

Nude selfies

The irony, of course, is that the Internet defies rigorous fact-checking, so you can be whatever you want to be. (As the cocker spaniel sitting happily at the keyboard observed in the famous New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”) The greater irony is that the Internet does confer a kind of immortality on those who use it: Thanks to Google, our silliest juvenile posts will follow us to the grave (as many students who’ve posted nude selfies on Facebook and drunken videos on YouTube discover a few years later when they apply for jobs as respectable lawyers and accountants).

By the second act of Sex With Strangers, the action has moved to Olivia’s book-lined apartment in Chicago, where Ethan tries to convince Olivia that he’s a changed man, and, besides, his sex blogs were just fictitious exercises anyway (much as, presumably, Wallace Stevens plumbed the erotic pleasures of imagination in his poems after hours from his day job as an insurance lawyer). But in Ethan’s case it’s too late: The moving finger has writ and moved on, the toothpaste is out of the tube and can’t be stuffed back in, etc. And in any case, Olivia is looking for a lasting relationship and maybe a family; all Ethan can offer her is fame and fortune.

Hyperactive rodent

There’s plenty of chewable food for though here, and in the Philadelphia Theatre Company production (a collaboration with New Brunswick’s George Street Playhouse), Kyle Coffman makes a suitably hyperactive Ethan and Joanna Rhinehart a suitably willowy Olivia. Jason Simms’s lush revolving set establishes the contrast between the isolated getaway of Act I and the real-world big city of Act II. But at some point in Act II the debates between art and commerce, and books and Internet, grew repetitive and tiresome, at least to me. And Coffman’s unrelieved hyperactivity got me thinking not about writers and literature but about Steve Pacek’s hilarious turn as a similarly hyperactive rodent in the Arden Theatre’s 2010 children’s comedy, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, in which a boy tries to appease a mouse, only to discover that one small kindness leads to greater requests.

Sex with Strangers is an intriguing premise without a conclusion. This story’s punch line, I imagine, won’t be delivered for perhaps another 30 or 40 years, when the still-hyperactive Ethan runs for president, and Olivia votes for him.

To read another review by Mark Cofta, click here.