Theater review: Sex with Strangers, at the KC Rep, misses the #metoo moment
Sex with Strangers, the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s latest production, asks a question I never thought we’d need an answer to: What if the only thing professional women needed to rise to the top was a good lay?
The play, by House of Cards writer Laura Eason, opens in a remote bed and breakfast in rural Michigan in the middle of a snowstorm. Designer Brittany Vasta’s cozy set looks like an L. L. Bean catalog come to life: buffalo-plaid textiles, vellum lamp shades with animal silhouettes, and enough rustic wood paneling to raise a barn.
Olivia Lago (Vanessa Severo), a 39-year-old literary writer of little acclaim, is there to finish proofing her second novel without distractions. Enter Ethan Kane (CJ Eldred), codename “Ethan Strange,” the 28-year-old end product of someone trying to 3-D print toxic masculinity. Ethan spent a year, he tells her, trawling clubs and bars to find a new woman to sleep with each week. The aftermath became a graphic tell-all blog, Sex with Strangers, and then a New York Times-bestselling memoir.
In the first 20 minutes, Ethan crosses nearly every etiquette boundary: peeing with the door open, oversharing about his sex life, helping himself to Olivia’s bottle of wine. But the two strangers begin to bond (and flirt) over their writing and attendant insecurities. As the storm rages and the wine dries up, the truth comes out. Ethan knows who Olivia is. He read her first novel — twice. And he came to the cabin with the express purpose of meeting her — and maybe helping her career.
Director Chip Miller keeps their courtship zippy, albeit with a bit too much predatory couch circling. Much of the first act is a race to the bedroom, and Severo’s Olivia is a bit too prudish and distant for us to buy the pace. Still, Severo’s a talented enough performer to make us believe in Olivia’s interest, even if we don’t quite understand it.
Eldred has an admittedly difficult task: convincing Olivia — and by extension, us — to look past Ethan’s frat-boy image to the Sensitive Artist within. But in the first act, his performance rarely dips below the surface. Ethan comes off as a less likable Tucker Max: slippery and tryhard with none of the smoldering charisma needed to thaw chilly…hearts.
The second act, which takes place in Olivia’s Anthropologie-d living room, brushes up against more interesting conflicts — professional jealousy, the tradeoffs of commercial versus critical success, the frustration of aging beyond your “prodigy” years. Elizabeth Kline’s lighting design sexes up the joint with illuminated bookshelves, colors pulsing in time to sound designer Cricket S. Myers’ moody beats. And Eldred is stronger here, cloaking Ethan’s manipulation in neuroses and feigned vulnerability.
But Severo trades her trademark specificity for generalized anger with a wide blast radius. Some of this is baked into the script: Eason draws Olivia with a broader brush than Ethan, making her motives opaque and her arc less complex. It doesn’t help that Sarah M. Oliver’s Act Two costumes make Olivia look more prim and matronly than her behavior suggests (she’s 39, not 63, and ostensibly sexually liberated).
A bigger problem: in this production, we never really understand why Olivia — an intelligent, worldly novelist and lover of French feminist writers — is so eager to add her body to a mountain of sexual conquests snow-kissed by date rape. Ethan is a man who, in the world of the play, has publicly written about fucking women and leaving them unconscious in pools of their own vomit — in one case, leaving an unconscious woman in the middle of a highway.
Meanwhile, the script is constantly signaling to us that Olivia isn’t so great, either. She’s ambitious! She’s calculating! She decided to take a deal with a Big Five publishing house instead of releasing her book on Ethan’s proprietary ebook platform!
These are not equivalent sins.
Eason makes a few gestures toward critique. When Ethan tries to wave off his worst indiscretions as exaggerated or fictionalized, Olivia reminds him that he’s still propagating narratives that treat women like trash — he’s still encouraging his fans to behave like “Ethan Strange.”
But the script wallpapers over other behaviors, including a much darker late-play betrayal, while all the while embracing the structure and signposts of classic romance. As a result, Sex With Strangers feels sloppy about its politics and confused about its own message, endorsing a toxic relationship without putting much effort into articulating why.
The Rep and its artistic director, Eric Rosen, couldn’t have predicted the revival of the #metoo movement when they made their season selection — nor its persistence when similar campaigns have quickly faded from public consciousness.
But Rosen’s program notes offered him an opportunity to contextualize the play and comment on the conversation the theatre is implicitly entering. Instead, he took a facile and culturally tone-deaf route, focusing on Facebook and online dating and the classic struggles of the “human heart.”
“I feel like the Rep’s lost its bite,” a stranger said to me at a party recently. At the time, I demurred. But after walking out of Sex with Strangers, I feel more comfortable replying, “Me, too.”
Sex with Strangers
Through March 25 at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Copaken Stage
13th and Walnut
816-235-2700
