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Seeing a play by Jon Robin Baitz is like having dinner at the Four Seasons after a steady diet of McDonald's.
In a theater where adolescence is the norm, Baitz is an adult. His characters have a complexity, a richness, a level of cultural awareness that was once standard but is now exotic.
Anton, who narrates Baitz's stunning new play, "The Paris Letter," embodies a kind of sophistication that has no contemporary equivalent. He owned a restaurant that was chic in the '50s, was an editor at the legendary but short-lived magazine Flair and had a brief affair with Sandy in the early '60s, when being gay still carried a whiff of scandal.
Baitz has caught him perfectly — and John Glover plays him with deliciously restrained elegance.
Sandy, on the other hand, a wealthy German Jew, has struggled to repress his gay longings. He has married a worldly woman who was a friend of Anton's. She knows about their affair.
The comfortable life he has led — managing hundreds of millions of dollars for his father's old clients — is threatened by an infatuation with a financial expert many years his junior.
The play leaps backward and forward in time. Its five actors each plays several roles. Ron Rifkin, for example, plays both Sandy and the old-line shrink who "helps" him overcome his homosexuality.
One of the most impressive scenes is one in which young Sandy (Daniel Eric Gold) takes his mother (Michelle Pawk) to Anton's restaurant. Pawk plays the mother with an uncanny ability to project maternal intuitions and blindnesses.
Gold makes the awkward, overprivileged son unexpectedly sympathetic. He and Jason Butler Harner as the young Anton handle their love scenes with sobriety and grace.
If the play has weaknesses, it is the melodrama that begins and ends the action. Baitz lets Sandy off too easily in the final scene.
Although Rifkin is skillful at playing the charming Sandy, he is not entirely persuasive in his sometimes too abundant declarations of love for his wife. Was Rifkin deliberately undercutting these declarations?
Still, "The Paris Letter" remains further proof of Baitz's power to create plays with novelistic depth.
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