As it turns out, not much. Act II subjected us to another hour or so of self-recrimination. My interest sapped and my patience spent, I barely had the energy to bring my hands together for the curtain call. I shuffled out, wondering why anyone had thought three hours of this would make good theater, and -- more importantly -- why, why playwright David Hare hath so forsaken me.
Being a Hare fan has always been easy until now. The Great White Way adopted him as one would a gifted protégé (which always places a playwright under immediate suspicion), but the prolific Hare still produces plays with strong backbones and a subtle sting. He made his reputation with left-leaning dramas, such as Knuckle, Plenty, and A Map of the World, in the conservative climate of Thatcher's England. The "protégé's" particular gift lies in creating characters with more than three dimensions, whose private interactions reveal a stubborn, sometimes tragically inescapable, political context. I've always liked the fact that I have to work to get what I can out of Hare's plays -- if I pay attention, I'll get to the meat of the matter; I'll get to the prize.
The prize-winning Skylight is obviously meant to function like Hare's other work -- as both intellectual and emotional revelation. Set in contemporary London, the play presents one night in the life of Kyra Hollis (Gina Nagy), a 30ish teacher at a tough inner-city school, and Tom Sergeant (Frank Corrado), a wealthy restaurateur in his early 50s. Like George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the characters undress themselves over the course of the play, via selective memory and bitter argument. Alas, this basic structure is where the resemblance ends. Without the booze or the bite, Tom and Kyra are no George and Martha.
In Act I, we discover that Kyra was, at age 18, hired on as a waitress at one of Sergeant's restaurants. She became Sergeant's assistant and came to live with his wife and children. Eventually her friendship with Sergeant grew into a six-year love affair. When Sergeant's wife discovered the affair, however, Kyra packed her things immediately and disappeared from their lives. We meet Tom and Kyra three years later, shortly after his wife has (somewhat conveniently) died of cancer. Reeling from his losses, Tom has come back to try to rebuild his relationship with Kyra. Although their passion for one another is undiminished, their values are fundamentally opposed. The two can no longer bridge the guilt nor the anger nor the personal politics that pushed them apart.
We discover all of this not through dropped hints, telling action, or dramatic twists, but simply because Tom and Kyra say so. Hare decides not to bother with subtext here: Everything's out in the open in the first hour. "Your whole life is an act of denial," one says; "I have become my anger," says the other.
Not to drag Albee onstage again, but Woolf succeeds as drama because Albee writes a human argument in all its ugly, graceless, nonsensical glory. Listening to George and Martha, we're kids listening in at our parents' bedroom door. The fact that they've probably had this argument a hundred times before only makes it more painful to hear; it only raises the stakes. In spite of the similarly intimate nature of their relationship, Tom and Kyra, on the other hand, might as well be pundits on Face the Nation. Hare wrote long, articulate speeches for each of them, to which they listen patiently and then respond.
This is all a damned shame, since Nagy and Corrado come off as accomplished actors committed to a production unworthy of their energy. By the end, I was too tired of listening to care. As Tom remarks at one point: "For me this is terribly important, but I'm fucked if I can really say why."
