Word: marber
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...CLOSER Patrick Marber's bruising drama about relationships is weakest when it tries most to shock (a cybersex scene). But as a portrait of the way modern urbanites strive and fail to connect, it makes an impact. The Broadway cast of this British import, headed by Natasha Richardson, could hardly have been bettered...
...essentially Friel's lack of self-consequence that makes her so appealingly distinct from other British actresses--and many American ones too. "Anna doesn't have stage-school technique," notes her countryman Patrick Marber, writer and director of Closer. "She's very natural and all from the heart...
...your own niche on the stage, playing Sally Bowles in a radically revamped version of Cabaret is one sure way. Deciding how to follow up that Tony-winning turn, however, is a tougher call. Richardson twice turned down an offer to join the four-person Broadway cast of Patrick Marber's hit London play Closer. Asked a third time, she thought it over for a weekend and agreed--not because the role promised an acting breakthrough but simply because she loved the play. "Writing like this," she says, "doesn't come along that often...
...Marber's icy dialogue has the timing of a TV sitcom and the lonely echo of a prison cell. "Is there anyone you'd like to phone?" Alice is asked in the hospital. "I don't know anyone," she replies. Marber, who doubles as the director, places his characters in pools of light surrounded mostly by darkness. Their isolation is symbolized further by the play's most startling and curious scene: Dan lures Larry into a bogus rendezvous by posing as a sluttish girl in an Internet chat room, their cyberencounter typed out on a giant computer screen onstage...
Closer is such a shrewd piece of contempo-realism that its shortcomings as drama might be overlooked. Marber's tactic of eliding large chunks of time--people meet; in the next scene they've been living together for months--stresses the impersonal power of sex but robs the characters of human dimension. The cybersex scene is clever but seems entirely detachable from the rest of the play. Like a skilled hooker, Closer is satisfying mainly in the moment; as a lasting experience, it leaves something to be desired...