Laura Eason’s ‘Sex with Strangers’ by PTC (2nd review)

Eason puts her two characters in an Agatha Christie-like situation: a blizzard outside, no phone, no Internet. Unfortunately, no one is murdered. Olivia, a teacher and writer (Joanna Rhinehart), works alone in a cozy cabin until the brash blogger Ethan (Kyle Coffman) bursts in. He's too late to get his own cabin and the proprietor is gone, so he has to stay.

Exposition comes quickly by the shovelful. Ethan has read Olivia's first novel: "I was, like, possessed by it." He too is a writer — of a blog ("one step above catalogues and fortune cookies") called, yes, Sex with Strangers. Olivia hasn't read it. Ethan launched his best-selling, movie-optioned writing career by seducing one woman a week for a year and blogging his exploits as "Ethan Strange."

Eason paints a generational divide — Ethan's about a decade younger than Olivia — about not only sexual mores, but the Internet. "This is crazy to me," Olivia protests. "Isn't there anything you want to keep private?" It's a familiar and tedious conflict — young vs. old, web baby vs. Luddite — that feels forced. Really, Ethan snorts with derision because Olivia's laptop is bigger than his iPad? Are we to believe this woman lives in a cave?

And so to bed

Once Ethan warms up from the cold and eats a little, he's in the mood for guess-what — and Olivia, in the first of several unlikely events, quickly succumbs. After all, there's no TV or Internet in this cabin — might as well fuck, right? Is it old fashioned of me to have trouble accepting that strangers — especially two people so lacking chemistry as these — would be in bed within 20 minutes of meeting?

Sex puts a button on the play's first scene (and the second, and the third), but is just a stepping-stone in the budding relationship between two ambitious writers — one who wants traditional book publishing success with her new novel, the other who is creating an app that could revolutionize e-books.

As much as I struggled to believe that sensible Olivia would hop into the sack with a blue-haired slob like Ethan, I yearned to return to their frolic once the play deteriorated into a tedious discussion about their writing, which the audience never really experiences or appreciates. Ethan says Olivia's work is "totally brilliant" and "fucking incredible," but what does that mean to us? Olivia praises Marguerite Duras in stiff paragraphs, but she's also capable of declaring, "I look good in them pants."

Who cares?

In Act II, Eason extends their relationship far beyond those first few cabin days. In each of these Chicago scenes (framed by Olivia's distractingly fake bookshelves), they report to each other about what's happened (so that we know), inventing reasons to argue. Olivia kicks Ethan out several times, but just can't quit him. Both of them grow dislikable for their wishy-washy decision-making, which continues right up to the play's final seconds, stranding us in a will-they-or-won't-they-but-wait-I-don't-care moment.

Most two-characters plays concern layers of revelation: Secrets emerge that change the dynamic between the protagonists. In Sex with Strangers, the more that's revealed, the less we care.

To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.