Kiss and Tell.("Mouth to Mouth" and "Romantic Poetry")(Theater review)

To the list of playwrights whose gravestones should read "Finally, a Plot" let us add the name of Britain's Kevin Elyot. Elyot's 2001 play "Mouth to Mouth" (directed by Mark Brokaw, at the Acorn) is a Proustian exercise in guilt recollected in tranquillity. The play begins and ends in a South London home, where two old friends sit at a kitchen table. Frank (David Cale), a blocked gay playwright with AIDS, is jabbering about hospitals, drugs, and doctors; Laura (Lisa Emery), a silent, attractive middle-aged woman, stares out the window at the garden, wearing sunglasses and chain-smoking with a tremor in her hand. From this minimal and mysterious opening, full of palaver and portentousness, the play unfolds backward, in a series of strategic anecdotal scenes that tell a tale of lust, betrayal, and loss.

The tantalizing slickness of the play's construction is matched by a terse, elliptical narrative style. But what passes for a show of elegant control--"beautifully modulated" is how such thin works are usually praised--is actually a sort of authorial fudging. Tone and tact substitute for depth. Instead of letting his characters find their meaning, Elyot imposes it on them. The structure insures that the audience is never ahead of the characters, though Elyot always is. Underdeveloped and overburdened, Frank and Lisa stagger through the evening, lumbered with intellectual and emotional baggage that they are unequipped to carry. As a result, "Mouth to Mouth" feels arch and stillborn; the author doesn't surprise himself or us. The play's title invokes the kiss of life, which Frank supposedly gave to Laura's drowning fifteen-year-old son--a kiss that, it turns out, included a tongue down his throat. Elyot's storytelling is a similar act of artificial respiration, barely reviving his foundering characters, who gasp for the oxygen of a fictive imagination.

At the center of this tale of woe is Laura's buff son, Phillip (the excellent Christopher Abbott). He is the apple of his mother's eye and, we learn, of Frank's hungry heart. Wearing only his pajama bottoms, he straggles into the middle of a fraught cocktail party, at which Laura's buttoned-down dentist husband, Dennis (Richard Topol), is entertaining his brother Roger (Darren Goldstein), a boorish wine seller, and his dim wife, Cornelia (Elizabeth Jasicki)--Corny, both by nickname and by nature. Just back from a trip to Spain with school friends, Phillip stands before us like a Calvin Klein underwear ad: bare-chested, dishevelled, his bedroom eyes full of sleep and pliant sweetness. In the flirtation between mother and son--"You horror! I bet you didn't think of me once," Laura says--there is an unmistakable whiff of the Oedipal. Later, when Phillip's holiday snapshots reveal a tattoo on his inner thigh--the name of a girl he met in Spain--Laura is scandalized. Phillip stomps out. "It's just so hard, letting go," she tells Frank later, calming down. "And the awful thing is this is just the beginning." At this point, unsummoned and unexplained, Phillip returns with a CD in hand: to placate his mom, he tangos with her, like you do.

Of the many betrayals in this daisy chain of disillusion, the only one dramatized onstage is Frank's betrayal of his friendship with Laura. The well-acted moment is shocking. Finding himself briefly alone with Phillip, Frank throws himself at the boy, like a grizzly gobbling a salmon. When the embrace is over, Frank is all plaintive desire and Phillip all cool disdain. "You shouldn't have done that," Phillip says. "You'd be dead if it weren't for me," Frank says, pleading his case. "I bloody wouldn't," Phillip replies. If the moment reveals Phillip as an amoral cool cookie--"He's going to break a few hearts. . . . The little devil," ...