Men and women sleep not with each other but with the memories, the regrets, the hopes of unions yet to come. Our adulteries are internal; they deepen our aloneness.
- George Steiner
In “Orange Flower Water” two married couples, friends for many years, transgress the boundaries of friendship and commit adultery. The affair between David and Beth destroys both marriages, leaving ruin for David's wife, Cathy, and desolation for Beth's husband, Brad. Leaving the profound unhappiness of their marriages, David and Beth find their new life with each other has come at immeasurably great cost and their future happiness together is far from assured. We spend a great deal of time in the bedrooms of these four people, and even more time in the misery of failed love, the terrible combat of intimate betrayal and soul-destroying dissatisfaction. Their brief scenes out in the world, interacting with each other as community, watching their children's soccer games, are so mundane that they only accent the intensity of all that occurs in their failed homes, the vicious, desperate engagements behind closed doors.
The play is performed on open-area staging, the audience on opposite sides of the playing space, with us facing the action and each other, as they face the action and each other. All four actors are on-stage throughout, seated in chairs on the four corners when they are not engaged on the bed that is the focal point of their lives and their drama. The outdoor scenes are played up against tilting walls that define the containment of their world. Nothing occurs outside the sight of all involved, whether they are present in the real-world moment or not.
Craig Wright writes strikingly realistic dialogue, but these are not people with great insight, not people who are complex or particularly sophisticated. They are very ordinary, their passions and needs so common that we can't help but see ourselves in them. Whether we know this experience or not from our own lives, we know their lives from our own experience. Unfortunately, the banality that makes it so universal also denies it a certain richness, a depth that more interesting, more developed characters might have brought. When the conflict devolves into shouted curses of the most vulgar, dehumanizing sort, into threats of physical domination, we can appreciate how such pain grows inevitably inarticulate, but we can't help but imagine how a more controlled volume, deeper, more insightful characters could have brought more understanding to the circumstances of each other and to us. Less heat and more light.
Allison Narver directs this superb cast with terrific balance and clarity. The 70 minute playing time hasn't a moment of slack and is perfectly paced to bring us to the unsettled resolution with a sense of inevitability that is satisfying. Hans Altweis has a powerful, vigorous masculinity that brings sensual heat to David's relationship with Beth. As played by Betsy Schwartz, Beth walks a tight wire balancing her essential responsibility with her need to be empowered in a relationship, autonomous in a way she has never been with her husband, Brad. That man is given a crude authenticity by Ray Gonzalez, and although he is never truly a brute, no monster, he is also a man who can never bring real comfort to his wife, never really connect with her in the intimate way she needs. That need for the genuinely intimate is also the driving force between Cathy, strikingly played by Jennifer Lee Taylor, and her husband, David. In an extraordinary scene she explores and explicates all that she needs from David while they are making love, or rather while she is having sex with him. Intensely erotic, it is even more powerful for the urgency and inadequacy both of them bring to each other, and for how nakedly, how sadly it reveals their emotional impotence.
New Century Theatre Company is one of the most important arrivals on the Seattle theater scene in some time, announcing their high ambitions with the brilliant production of “The Adding Machine” last year. With “Orange Flower Water” they are expanding that promise with a daring, first-rate contemporary drama. The acting and directing of this company is irreproachable, and their selection of material is exciting and significant. I hope this production draws a solid audience because it deserves it, and because this town deserves to have a company like this be successful.
PICTURED ABOVE: Betsy Schwartz & Hans Altwies
PHOTO BY: MJ Sieber
