On a snowstormy dark night, tending a Northern Michigan B&B for a friend, Olivia (handsome Joanna Rhinehart) is curled up on a couch next to the fireplace. No internet connection or phone, just pen in hand as she works on a paper. She hears the screeching halt of a car, then at the front door, a man pounding on it, roaring a need and right to enter. So the dignified 39 year old teacher lets the guy in. Yeah, sure. It turns out Kyle Coffman’s handsome hunk Ethan, 11 years younger, earns a good living from self-controlled web publishing of his weekly affairs, each with a different stranger. Of two annual volumes already out, one’s due to be a film. And does insecure Olivia ask the dangerous oversexed jerk to leave? Almost, but nope. It seems Ethan read and loved Olivia’s first novel, a critical success 15 years ago that attracted few readers. Sure that she’s got a second, of the type he himself has been trying to write, he wants to avail her of his publishing smarts. But not before his love of her book charms her into an explicit firelight fantasy made real. He also gets to stay in her bedroom (to which he seems already to have known the way), for the night (and many more to come). It must have been overwhelming, because he’s able to leave trickily with her new manuscript. Darned sneaky. By Act II, Olivia’s in her book-lined urban apartment. Ethan’s shown he loves to be around intellectuals like her. She’s conflicted with Ethan, though, since she’s close to getting a respectable publisher to put out a traditional edition of her book that will sell. Ethan’s produced and shown her the literary book he’s put his hopes on, but her pronouncing it “poetic” doesn’t seem to be enough for him. And what about their “love”? Is it of each other or self or career enhancement? Or sex and romance per se? Director David Saint wisely mixes his actors, whenever possible, into scenes where their chemistry as lovers, not only sexual mates, prevails. These promote interest in whether or not their personal lives will follow their literary ones. Although the first act’s situation is as unlikely as the scenic design of that B&B (which looks more like a hunting lodge), the second is as realistic as Olivia’s home. There’s good (which includes costuming) following not so good (reference my opening two paragraphs). Mid-20th Century, the play would have been sold as a matinee comedy. Titillating, such a show didn’t play out the pleasure provoked, which the modish, modern Sex with Strangers does so often that it can provoke the opposite feeling. Yeah, bored. Well, maybe not for traditional ladies who lunch and then attend matinees.
