Word: valmont
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...game of sex and vengeance. Winsome Brown as the Marchioness, Merteuil, plays her role with bloodthirsty relish. Her obvious confidence and professionalism enable her to add the strain of comic self-consciousness that brings the play to life. Brown moves in tightening circles around Tom Hopkins as Valmont, the lethargic predator turned prey. Hopkins' Valmont is charming and at times strikingly perverse. On the other hand, the interaction between these two is oddly flattened, and the seductive tension which might have developed between them never quite takes shape...
...Valmont encounters and subdues several women, from the naive Cecile Volanges (Bina Martin) to the promiscuous courtesan, Emilie (Danielle Kwatinetz). His primary goal, though, is to make the pious and virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Jeanne Simpson) "betray everything she believes in." And achieve this goal he does, but he falls in love with Tourvel along the way. The forbidden "Lword," which he once shared with the Marquise, has become so alien to him that when he does feel it once again, he shuns it. He is so afraid of exposing his Achilles heel--his real personality--that he alienates...
...While Valmont seduces everything in a skirt, the Marquise is an equally manipulative woman. She claims that she was "born to dominate [the male] sex and avenge my own." She is a mistress of detachment. She creates a stark barrier between her true feelings and her appearance. These deceptive underpinnings fuel the nervous tension that culminates in an eventful climax, in which the protagonists learn that "vanity and happiness are incompatible...
Hughes stands out as the lascivious, obnoxious and Machiavellian Valmont. Everything from his swaggering gait to his libidinal outbursts a delineates a distinctive Valmont. His character suffers from frustrated vanity, and he devises his own fall with unwitting irony. He disgusts the audience with his lecherousness and charms them with his seductive demeanor...
...malice that drips from every pore of Valmont's character is unmatched by the Marquise. While Valmont and the Marquise are supposed to be equally evil and apathetic, Valmont surpasses the Marquise on both these counts...