Do fragments of
words and quirky shards of thought, quick sensual snippets of male
kisses, angry European screeds that American foreign policy over the
past decades has done the world only harm, along with iconic photos of
war, misery and other indecorous things turn you on? If so, and you are
of the left-leaning type, Caryl Churchill’s short piece will certainly
stir up your bile and make you once again go charge onto the
barricades. But, if you have tired of America being viewed as the
world’s great provocateur without any decency, and foreign policy DNA
is not already deep within you, this diatribe of non-naturalist
dialogue between two handsome men acting as representatives of the
United States and Great Britain will be worth passing by. Your
reviewer happens to enjoy the political and does crave a respite from
the tried and true of getting someplace by a direct route, so he has
some praise for Churchill's interestingly constructed polemic. She
presents her opinion without blinking. But with that said, this
production has an academic feel to it as if it is aimed at a small
world of perceived influentials rather than a larger
audience. John Vreeke’s direction does mask some of the script’s
flaws by having his cast move about the small set and Adam Jonas
Sellager and Peter Stray are both successful in their ability to
immediately react to each other as if long time partners, making their
shorthand of words and phrases stick. What they accomplish is similar
to what some are able to do in real life; hearing the first couple of
notes of a song that sparks in one’s memory not only the rest of the
song, but the entire context and textures of the moment when the song
was first heard.
Caryl Churchill (born 1938) is a long-time
fixture in the theatre world including association with the Royal Court
Theatre in London. She has
penned dozens of scripts in her career
and come to be known for her non-naturalistic style as she delved into
feminist themes. Her critically acclaimed Top Girls (1982)
received multiple Obie Awards and was revived in 2007-08 by the
Manhattan Theatre Club in New York to wide praise. Drunk Enough
was first produced at the Royal Court in November, 2006. Its American
premiere was at the Public Theatre in New York City last March. Other
recent Churchill work in the Potomac area including Cloud Nine,
Far Away, and A Number as well as Fountainhead's
2005 production of Top Girls. Director Vreeke has a deft touch
for this play and has cast it well. His casting of two relative
unknowns is a blessing in fact. It allows the script to take center
stage so that the audience can pay attention to the words and the
playwright’s trajectory without letting celebrity names get in the
way. He has his two actors very well-honed in the herky-jerky,
short hand style of presentation and interaction that playwright
Churchill demands. In this piece Segaller and Stray solidly do what is
asked of them by Vreeke without flashiness. They let the script’s
themes take over. Vreeke has also selected some very iconic images to
project on a rear wall to set the dark mood of this production. Nicely
selected scene changing music with titles such as “Love Hurts” is also
an enormous help to add some theatrically to the evening.
Segaller is the
“top” in this world, at first a quietly confident Dom; provocative,
handsomely sexy, with a lean body and loving touches as he coos love.
But over time, his mean streaks come to the fore as does his internal
fears of being unloved; always needing attention and affection. In some
scenes he wears a “wife-beater” undershirt so that his well-honed upper
body and arms are a sensual prop. He is all swagger and posturing as he
deflects any thought that his views of life are not quite right. He has
a carapace that does not let others inside; until affection is
withdrawn and then the hurt of a little boy comes forth. Stray
skillfully plays the more submissive mien needed in his role. He
leaves his unseen wife and nurturing “feminine” family for the
strutting Segaller with some doubts, for sure, but leaves he does for
the more muscular, manlier partner. At first he is reactive and only
wanting to see the good in his new partner. “I can’t say no” is one of
his first lines. But, over time, he thinks more deeply and begins to
cool in his ardor. At blackout the relationship is in tatters. The
kisses between the two start as passionate and their touches as lovers
are all of building warmth between them, but as this short piece of
agit-prop continues along, the kisses become colder and the touches
more of a power relationship than of love.
Except, maybe, the
fact that Sam appears to be leading Guy into Armageddon. In Caryl
Churchill's pleasingly, teasingly naked political satire "Drunk Enough
to Say I Love You?," Guy is quite literally Great Britain, and Sam's
the good ol' U.S.A. Any gray area regarding this assertion is erased in
Forum Theatre's program, which identifies Sam as "a country." 
Most of the sentences that lovers Guy (Peter Stray) and Sam
(Adam Jonas Segaller) exchange in Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to
Say I Love You? get abandoned somewhere in the middle, their
direct, indirect, and prepositional objects left hanging the air,
implied but unvoiced. Instead, the British playwright slaps a trailing
verbal ellipsis to the end of each line, and John Vreeke’s staging
ensures that we hear every one. Stray and Segaller really lean into
those pauses, so the effect isn’t one of crisp, whip-smart, Mamet-esque
banter but of a sustained, reflective, overtly theatrical conversation.
We realize that the two men aren’t interrupting each other, or
finishing each other’s sentences, they’re riffing on each other’s
ideas. Churchill being Churchill, those ideas invariably run to some of
the more nakedly self-serving rationalizations behind Anglo-American
foreign policy.
The twist: Guy and Sam aren’t just a couple of randy Council
on Foreign Relations wonks, they’re, respectively, Britain and the
United States, or anyway anthropomorphized gay incarnations thereof.
True, their pillow talk has all the charged sexual ferocity of a
Brookings panel discussion. And, true, Churchill’s point here (Sam is
belligerent and self-involved; Guy is infatuated and passive) ain’t
subtle—or even convincingly argued. What it is, however, is awfully
well-written and generally well-captured.
Churchill threads the personal through the political like the
pro she is; whenever the evening’s pitched agitprop threatens to bubble
over into drunk-Poli-Sci-major-at-a-party territory, an abrupt change
in tone deflates the rhetoric, exposing the all-too-human needs that
drive geopolitical events. At one point, Segaller’s Sam recites a long
list of interrogation procedures, each one boasting a more florid,
outlandishly grotesque description than the last, until he gets to:
“Beating, obviously. Rape, of course.” That sudden infusion of
matter-of-factness is expertly timed, perfectly delivered, and
chilling. Stray imbues Guy with a satisfying emotional range; in the
show’s brief running time, he finds occasion to invest the word OK
(Guy’s favorite) with every possible spin—assent (“OK!”), comprehension
(“Ah, OK”), and, ultimately, doubt (“OK...”)
The show’s design, by Michael Dove and Mark W.C. Wright, lacks the material’s precision edge, alas. When a series of projected photographic images helped place Guy and Sam’s discussions in specific, albeit metaphorical, time periods, I was grateful for them. But as the evening progressed they seemed to lose their organizing principle, devolving into so much star-spangled window dressing. And unlike Churchill’s dialogue, the ham-fisted selection of interstitial music doesn’t trust the audience’s ability to negotiate subtext. Case in point: the scene in which Guy and Sam get into a tiff over carbon emissions, preceded by—wait for it—Skeeter Davis warbling “The End of the World.”
