Word: lachiusa
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Michael John LaChiusa's Hello Again, currently playing at the cozy Boston Center for the Arts, tries incredibly hard to be sultry and irreverent in its comical look at sex. All types of sexualities--philandering housewives, been-there done-that prostitutes, straying husbands, and naive waifs--are thrown into LaChiusa's libidinous landscape. The play tackles not just run-of-the-mill sex, but sex between men and between people of different classes, sex in movie theaters and on futons, sex in the 1900s and 1960s...
...show's message is evident after the first few minutes--romantic love can be messy, disappointing, and confusing, but it can also be exciting, rewarding, and uplifting. The problem is that LaChiusa doesn't quite know how to bring originality to the timeworn themes of love and sex. And whoever thought up the idea of shining an extraordinarily bright and unbelievably unflattering yellow spotlight on actors' faces as they are climaxing, sure didn't help...
Despite years of worthy work, LaChiusa was a virtual unknown until a couple of months ago, when his equally imaginative First Lady Suite opened a too brief run off-Broadway. That collage featured a time-traveling romp in which Mamie Eisenhower caught her husband with a mistress, then journeyed with Marian Anderson to watch Ike integrate Little Rock, Arkansas; an eerie dream song in which a secretary to the Kennedys envisioned, on her way to the fateful motorcade in Dallas, the events about to unfold; and a wing-walking scene in which Eleanor Roosevelt's alleged lover, Lorena Hickok, bemoaned...
...surprise. The structure -- A meets B, B meets C, and so on until the last character encounters A -- comes from Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde. In that piece, set in fin-de-siecle Vienna, sex crosses social lines, allowing commentary, and serves as a metaphor for syphilis, permitting preachment. LaChiusa resists the obvious AIDS allusion. His love connections are timeless, and hopeless. Yet consistently thwarting his characters does not impede the ribald, puckish entertainment...
...most exciting thing is not what LaChiusa is doing now, but what he may do next. In vision and pure nerve, he promises to rival William Finn of Falsettos -- if not Stephen Sondheim himself...