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seduction…

nytheatre.com review by Martin Denton
August 15, 2005

Jack Heifner's play seduction... is billed as a "gay interpretation" of Schnitzler's Reigen (commonly known as La Ronde). In ten scenes, ten men pair off in succession, round-robin style: first a rent boy and a sailor, then the sailor and a handyman, then the handyman and a student, and so on (the other characters being a professor, a businessman, a teenager, a writer, an actor, and a producer). The mechanics of each scene are more or less the same: the men link up and engage in conversation (sometimes very brief) that amounts to foreplay, there is a blackout during which they have sex, and then there is a short epilogue wrapping up the encounter, after which one of the men exits.It's an oft-repeated formula; but what's an all-male La Ronde for in 2005? It's emphatically not about health issues, which purportedly were foremost on Schnitzler's mind when he wrote the original; the men in seduction... don't talk about safe sex and, as far as I could tell, don't engage in it either (shame on them).Is it, as the subtitle suggests, some kind of meditation on/validation of contemporary gay life? I don't think so: there's only one gay couple depicted here, and as the play's structure requires they're not monogamous; they don't even seem to be particularly happy. The sailor labels himself as straight, his sexual activities notwithstanding (and he calls the rent boy a "fag"); the teenager refers frequently and guardedly to a girlfriend. The actor and the writer (an author of gay-themed plays) are presented as irritating manifestations of swishy stereotypes. No, there's not much here for Gay Pride to be proud of.The listing in the FringeNYC Program Guide warns that the play contains male nudity; maybe the show is a celebration of male sexuality. Alas, only two of the six cast members seem fully comfortable with the (relatively infrequent) baring-all that's required by the script; most of the actors strain to cover up when they're exposed, calling attention to the artifice of having naked actors pretending to be actual naked people having, or just having had, great sex. And as for the sex itself, well almost all of it in seduction... is of the furtive variety. Most of the couplings here include at least one party who is ashamed of what he's doing; several are transactional, by which I mean that sex is a commodity being exchanged for money or something else of value. Only the rent boy is honest enough to admit this; perhaps that's the point.These musings notwithstanding, seduction...'s ad campaign will likely ensure healthy audiences, at least for the FringeNYC run. I don't know that they'll be all that satisfied with what they're getting, in terms of male pulchritude or anything else, for that matter. Heifner's script is not particularly funny or thoughtful; in fact several of the segments felt like nothing so much as set-ups for scenes in a porn film (what's a cheeky way to get these characters out of their own pants and into the other's?)Peter Bull's staging is efficient and brisk. The six actors deliver competent but uninspiring performances, with the exception of Phil Price as the teenager, who creates a character with depth and complexity about whom we might wish to learn more.