Adam opens a bottle of sparkling wine to mark a night for him and his wife Jan without their 8-year-old son, who’s doing his first sleepover. Jan dutifully takes a tiny, tiny sip and within a few minutes asks for some white wine. A behavioral cue, indeed. Can This Marriage Be Saved, as the old column in Ladies Home Journal was titled? It’s Fifty Minutes, the new show at St. Louis Actors” Studio.
Adam’s an architect, a partner in a firm he founded, and travels a lot. She’s a former dancer who’s trying to create a viable online business, and acknowledges that she’s a perfectionist. He was raised by Oregon hippies, she came out of the country club set in St. Augustine, FL. They live in a Brooklyn brownstone and the kiddo goes to an expensive private school. But it can’t be a perfect life, right, because…because, well, it’s a play.
He’s interested in a romantic evening. Even early on, there’s no missing the fact that she’s uninterested in romance and in him. She’s focused on her laptop work and occasionally reminding of how inadequate a parent she thinks he is. Nevertheless, his interest is not just physical, we learn, but emotional.
Playwright Michael Weller gives us two people who are, at the very least, hard to like. Jan, from the opening moments – viz, the wine episode above – is downright unpleasant. One tries to find in her a good person who’s merely caught up in the stresses of contemporary life, but there’s little evidence of that. Adam isn’t a schlub, but as the play progresses, we see little reason why he stays in the marriage beyond the child. They’re not people in whom an audience becomes emotionally invested.
That said, Julie Layton does a bang-up job as Jan, the Ice Queen trying to melt a little at the occasional moments she deems appropriate while acknowledging at other times how nasty and driven she is. Isaiah Di Lorenzo is Adam, and he conveys the character’s work to calm his wife and make her happy fairly well. Physically, though, he’s stiff – although one never knows if this is a directoral decision by SLAS associate artistic director John Pierson, to indicate how prepared Adam is for the near-inevitable rejection from the constantly angry Jan.
Lights come from Steve Miller and give us the progression through the long night in which the play is set. Andrea Robb’s costumes work well for the income level of these folks. But Adam talks about how Jan is known for her good taste, there are references to how she’s re-done the house, and Jan acknowledges that, yes, people do always say she has exquisite taste. The set really doesn’t reflect that at all.
Pierson keeps them moving well, and the actors give it a fine try. It’s the script that leaves us wanting.
Ninety minutes, no intermission.
Fifty Words
through October 6
St. Louis Actors’ Studio
Gaslight Theater
360 N. Boyle
314-458-2978