Speaking Tongues: A Theatrical Revelation

NEW YORK, Dec. 21 (UPI) -- Andrew Bovell, one of Australia's leading stage and screen writers, has written a play titled 'Speaking in Tongues" that is this theater season's most unusual offering in structure and style as it delves into a mystery with two casts made up of the same four actors.

A production of the Roundabout Theater Company at the Gramercy Theater, Bovell's elliptical drama is difficult to describe since it takes its audience through the looking glass to ponder the fragmented images it sees in the shards. Mirror shards reflecting shoes and other keys to the play's mystery are an important part of the set.

"Speaking in Tongues," a title that has no relevance to the play as far as this critic could divine, is about the disappearance of a woman whose car has stalled at night on a lonely road used as a shortcut to an upper middle class residential neighborhood in an unidentified American coastal city. Was she murdered?

By the end of the play, the answer to that question is revealed, although the woman's body has not yet been found. We must assume that it will be and that the case will finally be resolved in a courtroom where the testimony is likely to be as ambiguous as the narrative pieced together in this tricky theatrical invention that miraculously escapes the feeling of being contrived.

Since it is a contrived, much of the credit for keeping the play unfalteringly interesting, even fascinating, is the cast of four fine actors including Margaret Colin, who starred as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in "Jackie" on Broadway several seasons ago. The other members of the cast are Karen Allen, Michel R. Gill, and Kevin Anderson who made a strong impression in the recent Broadway revival of "Death of a Salesman."

In the first act, these four take the roles of two couples, who claim to be more or less happily married, on the town separately looking for adulterous affairs.

By chance, they trade marital partners and the audience encounters them in motel rooms where feelings of guilt are keeping them from enjoying their sexual adventures. One couple, Leon (Anderson) and Jane (Allen) consummate their affair, while the other, Pete (Gill) and Sonja (Colin) do not.

These scenes are played out on opposite sides of the stage and Bovell has his characters speaking almost the same dialogue, sometimes at exactly the same time, a gimmick he uses throughout he play. The rest of the act deals with what happens after the couples are reunited with their spouses and ends with two intriguing monologs.

The monologs are about events that occurred while the couples were pursuing adultery and describe events involving a man and a pair of brown shoes and a missing woman, the strange behavior of a male neighbor, and the high heel of a woman's shoe he was seen disposing of in some overgrowth..

In the second act, four more characters are introduced -- a woman psychiatrist (Allen) and her difficult nymphomaniac patient (Colin), the psychiatrist's husband (Gill), and the man who picks up the psychiatrist when her car stalls on a lonely road (Anderson). The monologs of the first act begin to make sense and connections among the characters become relevant and more poignant.

Bovell is better at developing character in the second act than he is in the first. Allen is particularly effective in playing a psychiatrist who dislikes her patient and has a difficult time not showing it. Colin is marvelous as the manipulative patient who delights in seeing her psychiatrist writhe, and Gill is touching as the husband worried to death by his wife's failure to return home after an ominous recorded phone call about her situation.

Mark Clements' direction overcomes all the difficulties presented by Bovell's oddball play. He directed the European premiere of "Speaking in Tongues" at the Hampstead Theater and Derby Playhouse in England, of which he is artistic director and associate director respectively. The play premiered in Sydney in 1996 and has been produced throughout Australia.

Richard Hoover's set, nicely lit by Brian MacDevitt, accommodates a number of different room settings with a minimal amount of furnishings, and his smoky mirrors onto which images are projected cleverly visualize the cast's concerns. Jess Goldstein's everyday costumes are attractive as contemporary clothing can be without added stage frills.

Bovell, best known as a screenwriter and co-author of "Strictly Ballroom," is the author of a new screenplay, "Lantana," based on "Speaking in Tongues." It stars Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, and Barbara Hershey, and received its American premiere in New York last week.