Fourth Room’s First Production, Closer – “Intimate and Powerful”

Fourth Room Theatre presented Closer by Patrick Marber at the beautiful Chait Galleries December 8 – 17, 2011. The cast included Ottavia DeLuca (Alice), Rachel Korach Howell (Anna), Matthew James (Larry) and Kevin Moore (Dan). Angie Toomsen directed.Closer examines piercing ironies around truth, sexual passion, romance and the power—or lack thereof—they have to create true emotional intimacy.

About the Production

Four London strangers meet by chance and become ensnared in a tangle of love, desire and brutal deceit. Alice, a beautiful erotic dancer, falls in love with Dan, an aspiring author and obituarist. Dan becomes obsessed with Anna, a photographer who takes his portrait for a book cover. Anna is involved with Larry, a sexually-fixated doctor, who becomes painfully—and sometimes comically—linked to Alice and Dan. The interactions are, in respective moments, jaw-dropping, heartbreaking and hilarious.

“We chose Closer for our first project because it challenges both the actors and the audience to find humanizing, relatable territory beneath self-absorption and betrayal,” says Toomsen. “Like or loathe them, these characters get under the skin in an absorbingly uncomfortable way.”

Closer has been compared to Noel Coward’s Private Lives, Pinter’s Betrayal and even Les Liaisons Dangereuses. “One of the best plays of sexual politics in the language,” says John Peters The Sunday Times. Charles Isherwood Daily Variety calls it “brilliant and bracing…both bruising and beautiful, shatteringly funny and devastatingly sad.”

From the Review…

Fooled by the lie of “happily ever after,” we have been particularly bruised by our own romantic ineptitude. Fourth Room Theatre’s production of Closer is like a salve to sooth those wounds. This play is one of the only honest dialogues I have ever been privy to on the subject of romantic love, and as devastating as it is, one cannot help but breathe a sigh of relief that “Oh, it’s not just me. Love punishes everyone.”

…actors are unfailingly exquisite in their depiction of human selfishness, loveliness, and passion…tuned in at every moment to what was happening around them. This is breathtaking when it happens, and it almost never does

Director Angie Toomsen guides us through this conversation without kid gloves making neither more, nor less, of the script than it offers, letting the audience make of it what they will…In the hands of this capable company, nuances were delicately realized…”  read more