Other People
A Collection of Reviews
in question occurs between a forlorn investment banker and the part-time stripper he has paid to talk to him reinforced the point. "The trouble, of course, is that plays about confused, scattered people tend to be confused and scattered themselves. That sometimes seems the case with Other People. But if it veers about, it veers interestingly about. Shinn is a young American writer whose gifts for creating edgy, troubled characters, concocting sharply realistic dialogue and establishing a distinctive millieu are emphatically worth encouraging."
If that makes the play sound sad, well, it is. But it is also sharp, witty and humane. The characters can be absurdly self-centred, but they are also curiously engaging. And Dominic Cook's production features some spot-on performances. Daniel Evans - a memorable Peter Pan at the National a couple of years ago - brings out poor Stephen's every self-pitying tremor; James Frain carries conviction in the difficult part of Mark; Doraly Rosen, who plays Petra, is plainly someone to watch.
John Gross, The Arts: Even a grunt would be a relief Theatre.
The Sunday Telegraph, 03-26-2000
Such an encapsulation of Shinn's interesting comedy of Manhattan manners makes it sound déjà vu. But Other People is no such thing. The plot may meander unduly and lose its way in one or two narrative cul-de-sacs. Yet Shinn wittily represents a hot-shot Manhattan arty world, where his gay men and straight woman in their mid-20s are trying to make it. The "it" in question refers to love or success. Unfortunately nerves, narcissism and narcotics cloud their eyes and judgment.
Robert Innes Hopkins's clever, eyecatching sets, on a sliding or revolving stage, are rather like peep-show viewing booths. In Dominic Cooke's production, each scene is encased in small, glass-enclosed spaces as if to emphasise the characters' sense of confinement and self-absorption. The twittering Stephen, vividly brought to gay, garrulous life by Daniel Evans, is an on-line movie reviewer whose emotional linen is lavishly washed in public.
Dramatic trouble looms when he and the alluring Doraly Rosen as Petra, a lapsed stripper with a degree and depression, give a home to Stephen's never-quite lover, Mark. For Mark is not only a film-maker but also a crack addict in remission. The trouble, however, proves to be of an unexpected sort: Mark's treatment has turned him towards God and sexual abstinence.
Shinn proves an astute, compassionate observer of the games people play with themselves and others. Mark, whose introversion, phoney calm and emotional turmoil are rendingly conveyed by James Frain, soon has a supposed street-boy (Neil Newbon) in tow and tempting him hugely. The gay-love tensions and concealments are far too sententiously and lengthily paralleled by Petra's odd, flawed entanglement with a man she meets while working as a hostess.
Other People is, though, quite a cutting-edge comedy.
This, it may be recalled, was the same dramatic terrain as the noxiously sentimental musical Rent , still a big hit on Broadway but a reassuring flop in Britain. Not the least of Other People's qualities is that one of the characters offers a devastating critique of Rent's intellectual vacuity.
The play is sharp, intelligent and touching. Shinn can see the absurdity of his characters, and has a marvellous ear for preposterous New York psychobabble, in which characters are constantly "feeling their pain", experiencing moments of "catharsis" and admitting to their therapists that they have "a really degraded, self-loathing love instinct".
Yet though you begin by laughing at them, you also come to care about them, for the play memorably captures the loneliness and bewilderment of the single life in the big city. Hell may be other people, but these New Yorkers can't cope on their own, either.
Like a hip, gay-inflected version of that much-loved sitcom Man About the House, Other People concerns three characters in their mid-twenties sharing a flat, though dear old Paula Wilcox certainly wouldn't approve of any of them.
Stephen is a neurotic, unstoppably loquacious actor turned struggling playwright who scrapes a crust writing movie reviews for an online magazine. He shares his apartment with Mark, once his lover, a film-maker who has recently emerged from a drug rehabilitation clinic and has now got God in a big way; and Petra, a blonde beauty who finances her creative writing by working as a stripper.
In the course of the play, which covers the period from Christmas to the New Year, we watch the characters trying to make sense of lives of far-from-quiet desperation. Stephen still has the hots for Mark, but Mark becomes involved with a young street kid with a penchant for public masturbation. Petra, meanwhile, becomes ensnared by an investment banker who frequents her lap-dancing club.
Almost all the relationships, it goes without saying, end in tears, not to mention great gulping sobs of self-pity, and it is never certain whether the flatmates are going to give each other big supportive hugs or have another blazing row. The writing has the satisfying smack of lived experience and I just hope Shinn is aware of the silliness of his characters as well as their pain. I'd hate to think he took all their solipsistic whingeing entirely seriously.
Dominic Cooke directs a superbly acted and atmospheric production, full of the sounds of New York and with slick designs by Robert Innes Hopkins. Daniel Evans offers great comic value as the nerdishly camp Stephen, a strangely appealing character despite his passive aggression and "toxic" rage.
James Frain memorably captures the smug certainties of the born-again druggie and his precipitate fall from grace, while Doraly Rosen is truly touching as the stripper in desperate need of love. Shinn certainly looks like a shining prospect for the future.
Petra.....Doraly Rosen
Stephen.....Daniel Evans
Mark.....James Frain
Tan.....Neil Newbon
Man.....Nigel Whitmey
Darren/Waiter.....Richard Cant
By MATT WOLF
Life may indeed be other people, to repeat the adage duly quoted near the end of Christopher Shinn's Royal Court play "Other People," but there's no doubt whatsoever that its 24-year-old New York-based author is someone worth attending to right now. Perhaps best described as a gay American variant on Patrick Marber's distinctly hetero "Closer," "Other People" is as overwritten and sometimes unwieldy as its English cousin (of sorts is pulled taut. But such faults pertain to structure, not to a fresh voice or to compassion, both of which "Other People" contains in abundance. The real question posed by the play --- Shinn's second in the Court studio after the wildly acclaimed 1998 "Four," which I missed --- relates not to an unarguable talent; it's the practical issue of how many people will ever get to see either it or James Frain's altogether amazing central performance. The entire run (previews included) is a shockingly brief two weeks.
The play's shotgun appearance is a double shame, since its shape as it emerges in Dominic Cooke's affecting if leisurely production may be a shade too flaccid to ensure it any commercial life. (There's nothing, of course, to prevent it in time transferring downstairs to the Court mainstage.)
That assessment, however, in no way minimizes the cumulative impact of a series of clipped scenes that cast a melancholy eye over six New Yorkers during the festive season ending on a none-too-jolly New Year's Eve. Following the Court's opener, "Dublin Carol," this is the second play to set its characters' private miseries against the joy --- or not, as the case may be --- that is Christmas. But unlike that play, "Other People" doesn't rub our noses in the mismatch. Instead, it articulates a pain --- a collective of easily frayed nerves --- that no amount of time, holiday or otherwise, will easily heal.
The given season helps to explain the coming together of its characters, all of whom are drifters at differing points on the social spectrum and severed in various ways from society, family or even the past. Petra (the excellent Doraly Rosen) is newly returned from stripper work in Japan only to resume the same occupation in Manhattan. There, she is courted by a customer, the generically named Man (Nigel Whitmey), an investment banker in search of intimacy without physicality due to his claim that he has herpes.
Connections are proving no less troublesome for Petra's two East Village roommates, onetime semi-lovers now on the splits. Stephen (Daniel Evans, all puppyish overeagerness) is a garrulous film critic with a precarious job at Web site who doesn't have the easiest time with his (unseen) Connecticut family and is finding it even harder to handle the newfound religiosity of Mark (James Frain ), his ex, a recovering drug addict. A filmmaker with a highly developed sense of Zen, Mark would seem to have foresworn anything tactile, smoking and sex included. But that's before he meets Tan (Neil Newbon, doing very well by a role custom-made for Mark Ruffalo), a lethargically seductive street kid --- his favorite word is "whatever" --- who earns his keep disrobing and masturbating in public when he's not luring Mark into the privacy of an absent client's hotel room bathtub.
Robert Innes Hopkins' sliding set allows the play's various duos and trios to ease on and off in a series of encounters conspicuously lacking in the emotion-putting buttons that might characterize many a flimsier but better-made play. In the first act especially, several scenes outlive their welcome, and it's not always clear whether Shinn is indulging his characters' psychobabble (Petra lecturing Man on consciousness, say) or sending it up. One feels a surfeit of angst struggling to weigh anchor, as if Shinn were unleashing into one evening more melancholia than he truly knew what to do with.
The second act puts such reservations right, and disturbingly so, abetted no end by the first local theater appearance in years from Frain, the rising film actor ("Hilary and Jackie," "Titus," the imminent "Where the Heart Is"), here making a phenomenal stake on the stage as his natural home. Without in any way brightening proceedings --- it's the fundamental sadness of "Other People" that may account in part for this New York writer's appeal overseas --- Shinn gathers control over material that earlier on has seemed a largely undifferentiated morass.
And as the characters' communal sense of dislocation deepens, Frain 's Mark is the one to sear us furthest still, lapsing back into a dependency cunningly signaled at one point by a simple change of clothes.
That explains why his smile --- as it must be --- is both sweet and rather creepy, the facial index of a state of grace that we know to be a lie. "Oh God, I hurt, I hurt," says Mark late on, with disarming directness. So, too, does this play at its best, at which points both "Other People" and its star are really something.
Lighting, Johanna Town; sound, Paul Arditti. Opened, reviewed March 21, 2000. Running time: 2 HOURS, 20 MIN.
Date in print: Mon., Mar. 27, 2000
