The sexual act is hard to get across onstage. Directors have had to unlearn
all the old ways it was once done. Billowing drapery, the dimming of
lights, a sudden curtain: that entire evasive language is old hat, as
obsolete a thing now as barrel staves and buggy whips.
Jack, a traveling businessman, is HIV positive. He lies to Samra’s
bartender about this at first. He then comes clean. Nobody in this play
keeps a secret from anyone else for very long. Everybody in La Ronde, by contrast, is a practiced and inveterate liar, even about his or her possible infections. Theater might well be defined, along the lines of Schnitzler and another of his adapters, Eric Bentley—whose distinguished gay version of La Ronde antedates DiPietro’s by more than 20 years—as “bodies with secrets.” Flouting that ironic dogma by making these men so open, intimate, and forthright in the scenes with dialogue is perhaps what makes the ham-fisted coyness of the sex scenes here so doubly disappointing.
Through 8/25: Fri-Sat 11 PM, Sun 8 PM, Pride Arts Center, 4139 N. Broadway, 773-857-0222, pridefilmsandplays.com, $25-$30, $23 seniors, students, and military.
