By Gianni Truzzi
Seattle PostGlobe Theater Critic
When a play cautions “adult” situations – including nudity and steamy sex – you can be sure that the behavior of the characters will be anything but adult.
And so it is with Craig Wright’s jagged and brief “Orange Flower Water,” bravely and eloquently staged by New Century Theatre Company. At the start of the marital battles involving two couples, each party sits in their corner like prizefighters awaiting the bell. The matches are fought between husband and wives, often each other’s, in that eternal arena of intimacy, passion and mistake, the bed.
The fledgling troupe is wrestling with itself, too, in launching second production. The acclaim for their first venture last autumn, the stunning expressionism of Elmer Rice’s “The Adding Machine,” raised expectations for this actor-driven team of stage veterans.
It begins with a stock scenario, in which pharmacist David (Hans Altwies) begins an affair with unhappy housewife Beth (Betsy Schwartz). We witness their first motel room tryst, the besotted man trying to sway his lover away from her guilt. “There is no god,” he pleads with her, but the harsh existential truths are just a way to talk her out of her panties.
The affair itself between these suburban soccer parents is banal, its fallout utterly predictable. They are suspected, revealed and confronted by their spouses, their marriages dissolve in acrimony.
This might, in less adept hands, be merely bland television fare. But Wright brings the skills in truthful, uncomfortable dialogue that has helped him to elevate that medium (for the popular cable series “Six Feet Under” and co-creator of “Dirty, Sexy Money”). He provides meat that this cast of talents hungrily, and bloodily, rips into.
Schwartz neatly captures Beth’s Cinderella complex, inviting rescue through her confusion and weakness. It’s only in the final moments of confontation that she asserts herself with her knuckle-dragger husband Brad, played swarthily and convincingly by Ray Gonzalez.
Jennifer Lee Taylor plumbs the contradictions of David’s spurned wife Cathy. She is Beth’s opposite: a capable, self-aware working mother and confident partner. David’s perfidy weakens her, and Taylor matches Cathy’s newfound vulnerability with a final burst of sexual aggressiveness, hotly astride her lost husband in demanding break-up sex.
Surprisingly, it is Altwies who seems out of place, his formidable presence overshadowing the clumsy inner weakness that must lie at David’s core. What else but a desire to be the hero that self-sufficient Cathy won’t allow him to be drive him into the arms of the dishrag Beth? Altwies’ very strength as an actor – his embodiment of command – works against him here.
There is a cultivated flimsiness to Matthew Smucker’s set design, its hastily laid walls of scrap lumber making real the characters’ shambling exposure. The birch branches oddly intruding suggest the persistence of life into their contrivance of shelter.
That theme, which Wright tries to impose in a too-neat wrap-up at the end of the packed hour, doesn’t quite comport with the pain and confusion we have seen. Director Allison Narver wisely doesn’t force it, either. In allowing her actors to work truthfully, the play’s own truths emerge on their own.
A betrayal may be at the heart of this piercingly emotional tale of cleaved marriages, but New Century has certainly kept faith with its audience.
“Orange Flower Water” runs through July 20 at ACT Theatre’s Bullitt Cabaret, 700 Union Street. Tickets: $25, $20 for patrons under 25; (206) 292-7676 or acttheatre.org.
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