One Foot in the Closet, the Other One Roaming

"I told you so." That evergreen taunt has a mournful sting in the final moments of Jon Robin Baitz's new play, "The Paris Letter," which opened last night at the Laura Pels Theater in a clean production from Doug Hughes, the Tony-winning director of "Doubt, a Parable," that can't disguise the play's tendency toward clutter.

The familiar words are spoken in sorrow and in love as much as in anger, not as a petty act of vengeance but as a final, fatal judgment on a misspent life. The speaker is Anton Kilgallen, a gay man departing middle age who has lived an open, scattered, satisfactory existence on the glamorous fringes of Manhattan society. He is addressing Sandy Sonnenberg, an old friend, briefly a lover, who chose another path. Sandy married and prospered mightily in his father's banking business. He "cauterized" his attraction to men, only to watch the life of propriety and comfort he had cultivated disintegrate when the floodgates stemming his true sexuality finally burst open again.

The tortured affection that binds these men, articulated with complicated intensity by the superb actors John Glover (Anton) and Ron Rifkin (Sandy), is the most potent and provocative element in Mr. Baitz's ambitious but schematic play. Mr. Baitz's sprawling story line spans four decades and three generations. It includes a suicide, a murder and a headline-making financial debacle. But his writing is most compelling when Anton and Sandy are tête-à-tête, reflecting on or sparring about the divergent courses their lives have taken, even as their intimacy has continued.

In an early scene they share drinks over lunch, decades after Sandy ended their brief sexual relationship and entered therapy to cure him of his attraction to men. Sandy has since married Katie (Michele Pawk), one of Anton's dearest friends, but the old wounds haven't quite healed. Anton begins probing, and quickly strikes a nerve.

"No, I don't regret my 'choice,' " Sandy says. "You've never had love, have you? You've had facsimiles and replicas, but all the aloneness has gone unabated no matter how many friends you collect. This life of yours does not work. We're not allowed to say that anymore, but we all know it."

Since this censorious speech has been preceded by Sandy's confession that he feels at emotional loose ends, and may also be attracted to a younger banker, Burt Sarris (Jason Butler Harner), whom he is interested in, ahem, mentoring, Anton is not inclined to let it pass. "I would say that at the moment, old friend, I am not the one who feels alone," Anton replies. "I am not the one whose life isn't working. All those years of therapy, all those years of inculcation, and really, all you've got is what you were force-fed by some ghastly psychiatrist from the Eisenhower days! I wish he could see you now."

Mr. Baitz is always most interesting, and most effortlessly articulate, when he is tracing the interlocking grooves of psychology and morality.

In "The Paris Letter," the combustible ingredient of sexuality is added to the mixture, cranking up the firepower in the recurring debates between Anton and Sandy, who remain drawn to each other from a murky mixture of motives. Has Sandy kept Anton in his orbit in order to preclude his friend's achieving a more fulfilled emotional life? Does Anton play the role of doting best friend to Sandy and Katie to ghoulishly monitor Sandy's secret sexuality or out of a continuing attraction that he can't acknowledge?

Mr. Rifkin and Mr. Glover elucidate their knotty interaction with gratifying precision. Love, pity and contempt can flicker in quick waves across Mr. Glover's angular features during just a few lines of dialogue, while Mr. Rifkin's shrewd, economical performance signals the slow working of the poison in Sandy's soul.

But the intriguing lineaments of Sandy and Anton's relationship are not, in the end, fully explored, because Mr. Baitz has stretched his morality play about the dire ramifications of sexual repression across an excessively large canvas.

In addition to Sandy's friendship with Anton, the play depicts Sandy's loving marriage to Katie and his comfortably paternal relationship to his gay stepson, Sam (Daniel Eric Gold), as well as his adulterous dalliance with Burt. It moves back to the 1960's to show us the young Anton (also Mr. Harner) and the young Sandy (Mr. Gold) in the first flush of love. There we meet Sandy's blowsy, affectionate and unhappy mother (Ms. Pawk is particularly delightful in this role), and the nefarious Dr. Moritz Schiffman (Mr. Rifkin), Sandy's analyst and the author of cheery essays describing the midcentury-modern homosexual as "imprisoned in a cycle of instant gratification and despair, ever-renewing, ever-corroding, trapped on a Ferris wheel of hallucinatory pain."

Back in the waning days of the 20th century, Mr. Baitz gets himself trapped in the mechanical working of a plot that involves movie stars and big money (Burt seems to have been loosely modeled on Dana C. Giacchetto, known as the disgraced investment adviser to the stars), a secret stash of diamonds in Switzerland, a case of cancer and a fatal dose of barbiturates.

Small wonder that at times his dialogue has a soap-opera tang. (Katie: "I've watched you become more and more absent, remote, sad, so sad, always so sad, no matter what I do, and my heart is breaking.") Smaller wonder that the play's flashy, time-skipping structure does not allow for dramatic momentum to develop, or even for the play's central characters to maintain a secure hold on our interest and our compassion.

The plot hinges on an urgent missive sent with a foreign postmark, but despite its broad scope, "The Paris Letter" lacks the substance of a major epistle from the gifted, always interesting Mr. Baitz. It more resembles a series of disconnected postcards.

The Paris Letter

By Jon Robin Baitz; directed by Doug Hughes; sets by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Catherine Zuber; lighting by Peter Kaczorowski; original music and sound by David Van Tieghem; production stage manager, Tripp Phillips; production manager, Kai Brothers; general manager, Don-Scott Cooper; associate artistic director, Scott Ellis; director of marketing, David B. Steffen. Presented by the Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director; Ellen Richard, managing director; Julia C. Levy, executive director, external affairs. At the Laura Pels Theater, Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, 111 West 46th Street, Manhattan; (212) 719-1300. Through Aug. 7. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

WITH: Ron Rifkin (Sandy Sonnenberg and Dr. Moritz Schiffman), Jason Butler Harner (Burt Sarris and Young Anton), John Glover (Anton Kilgallen), Michele Pawk (Katie Arlen and Lillian Sonnenberg), Daniel Eric Gold (Sam Arlen and Young Sandy) and Christopher Czyz (Waiter).

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