At Studio 16 until November 10, 2018
Tickets $13-$31 at www.mitchandmurrayproductions.com
Posted October 28, 2018
Olivia and Ethan are strangers at the beginning of Laura Eason’s play, Sex With Strangers, and ironically, they are still strangers at the end in spite of having had lots of sex between their first encounter and their last. Olivia, almost 40, is a private, introverted novelist/English teacher while Ethan, not quite 30, has two distinct personas: his studly, sex-blogger one and the idolizing one he presents to Olivia.
There’s a lot going on in Sex With Strangers and, despite the sexy/arty poster (shown above) that has, apparently, presented marketing problems for Mitch and Murray Productions, not all of it is about sex although sex, having a lot of it and writing about it is how Ethan gets millions of hits every month on his blog.
Director Aaron Craven keeps the sex tasteful; there’s no nudity and just enough of Markian Tarasiuk with his shirt off to show us why Olivia (Loretta Walsh) finds Ethan so irresistible. Well, that and the fact that he thinks she’s brilliant; what writer wouldn’t fall for that?
At the beginning of the play, Olivia has holed up in a Michigan B&B to finish her second novel. There’s a snowstorm and cocksure Ethan barges in to share the space for the night. He helps himself to the place, raids the kitchen for something to eat and pees leaving the bathroom door open. Olivia is unimpressed until he lets her know he thought her first novel, published to mixed reviews, was wonderful. It turns out, he knows everything about her. He says he has been “inside” her head for ages. He knew she was staying at this B&B. It’s was not by chance that he turned up and that’s spooky.
Ethan has become a celebrity as a result of his blog which he then turned into a best-selling novel – Sex With Strangers – and which is now being made into a film. Having sex with a different, strange woman every week for a year and then writing about it online has, however, prevented him from becoming the serious, respected novelist he thinks he can be.
The thing is: who is the real Ethan? Has he lost himself in all that sex with strangers? What about the way he writes about the women he has slept with calling them fat or ugly or, “fucking sluts”. Will he write that way about Olivia? Can she trust him?
Eason’s script crackles as Olivia and Ethan reveal their differences. He thrives on the online comments – good and, especially, the bad – that his blog gets; she can’t bear the negative reviews her novel got and is fearful about publishing the second one. He thinks online publication is the only way to go; she loves real books. He believes nothing is too personal to write about; she is very protective of her privacy.
So, apart from sex, what do these two have going for them?
Walsh and Tarasiuk get some real chemistry going. He is all swagger and confidence; she is, initially, brittle and guarded with her arms across her chest but eventually she’s girlish and open. Tarasiuk shifts from self-confidence to petulance as Ethan’s fortune begin to tank and Olivia’s career takes off. Positions change.
John R. Taylor designs a functional, realistic set: a sofa that works in both the B&B and Olivia’s Chicago apartment with the simple addition of a throw. A painting here. A potted plant there.
Mitch and Murray Productions never fails to bring edgy, interesting scripts and complex, multi-dimensional characters to light. The end of Act 1 will have you hoping the intermission is short. The cliff hanger is: what does Olivia find out when she reads Sex With Strangers? And can she live with it?