The Qualms: Theater review by David Cote
Bruce Norris’s new play is set at a swingers’ party, which rather complicates the playwriting dictum: show, don’t tell. Unless you have a game cast and an open-minded audience, it’s tricky representing a scenario in which couples and threesomes split off for no-strings-attached horseplay (not with actual horses…I think). Norris’s solution is to have his eight characters do a lot of telling—which, as always with this master of peevishness and acrimony, escalates into telling-off.
Sexuality is such a wide-open, slippery theme, it’s hard for any writer to stake original ground: Is the polyamory community more socially evolved than the rest of us? In a hundred years, will marriage and monogamy be embarrassing relics, or are swingers creepy escapists who in fact embody the worst aspects of our hypersexualized consumerist culture? Norris argues both sides, putting the anti-swing-life venom in the mouth of Chris (Jeremy Shamos), an uptight money manager who thinks he and his pretty new wife, Kristy (Sarah Goldberg), are in for a night of fleshly pleasures. Chris’s eventual lack of empathy, his cerebral, relentlessly literal attitude toward mind and body comes in handy when he sputteringly likens partner swapping to “watching two dogs fuck in the street.” But while Chris’s articulate disgust is amusing, it does raise the question: What’s he doing there in the first place?
If The Qualms continues the set-’em-up-knock-’em-down arguing-jerks formula we’ve come to expect from Norris (Domesticated, Clybourne Park), he does it very well, with bravura interwoven dialogue, perfectly set-up jokes and juicy jeremiads about multiple American pathologies (sex is just the tip).
Pam MacKinnon directs a strong and frisky ensemble with her usual flair for crowd dynamics. Playing the most “relatable” but least likable of the bunch, Shamos so beautifully blends arrogance and shame, affability and viciousness, he almost reconciles his tortured character’s contrivances. Still, Norris’s people are complex, full of competing urges and appetites. And as stoned host Gary (John Procaccino) points out toward the end of the piece, statistically speaking, we’re all in bed with each other, whether we get off or not.—David Cote
Playwrights Horizons (Off Broadway). By Bruce Norris. Directed by Pam MacKinnon. With Kate Arrington, Donna Lynne Champlin, Noah Emmerich, Sarah Goldberg, Julian Leong, Andy Lucien, Chinasa Ogbuagu, John Procaccino and Jeremy Shamos. Running time: 1hr 35mins. No intermission.