Ignoble 'Savage' Flails and Fails

The opening scene seems straight out of a music video: minimalist stage, stark light, four actors encased in fashionably generic black and red. The impeccably timed dancing, emotionless and overtly sexual; the music, driving and anonymous. A heavily stylized plot takes shape--man fondles woman, who pulls away; another woman claws said man toward her--dominated by the same aggressively heterosexual assumptions that pervade MTV. The talons of this brand of "savage love" are thickly lacquered and varnished. And it's the ritualization of this savagery that makes it seem all the more deadly.

Any play that advertises "Love" in its title instantly traps itself in a certain genre, and the title "Savage/Love" inspires a cynicism which its script tries only half-heartedly to counter. Shuttling from scene to scene with dizzy velocity, the play attempts to cover all the aspects of modern love: jealousy, obsession, loneliness. There is no plot and no development; the nameless characters change personalities in each disjointed episode. It's about as profound and moving as a 30-second sound bite. The audience winces at lines like, "It is love. I will have to hide or flee"--a wince of sympathy for the actors who must recite such lines with a straight face.

Ultimately, it's the talent and energy of its actors that saves "Savage/Love" from the rubble heap of disposable pseudo-culture. The facile sound and fury of "love with its own mythology, its minor and pointless magic" is made to sound almost meaningful by Tom Giordano's earnest delivery. His scenes, which seem to focus predominantly on insecurity and isolation, evoke not pity but slow admiration for his character's courage.

Sliding with smooth facility from jealous to tender, maternal to monstrous, Silje Normand cradles her sleeping lover in one of the play's most emotive and best-written segments. Her manner is stylishly minimalist and her accent, which vanishes and reappears at random, is delightful. Normand skillfully handles what is probably the most overtly melodramatic line in the play, screaming, with a sudden viciousness, "I want to strangle your dreams inside of me!"

Shannon May, polished and not at all self-conscious, makes an absolutely arresting impression in almost every one of her scenes. The force of her talent gives the two "murder" sequences--when she informs a lover, "I killed you," with deadly and restrained passion--a drastically disproportionate significance. Whether she is flickering in the light of a green strobe or pacing across the stage reciting Shakespeare from a tiny book, she maintains a stunning poise that gives the play far more credibility than it deserves.

Yet the most remarkable save comes when, standing alone in front of the giant word "Loneliness," Ryan McKittrick dissects the blindness and isolation of urban life with startling delicacy and emotion. Bravely resistant to the oppressive miasma of cheekiness that permeates his scene, he sets the lines "The Eskimos have 26 different words for snow--such a fine alertness to what variously presses down" aflame with sincerity. Somehow, mysteriously, the playwright's pretension is transmuted into poetry.

But all the king's horses couldn't give this fashion victim of a play a fully convincing makeover. Pop culture, it complains, forces us to manufacture ourselves in the stylized image of our own mass-produced fantasies. The blatant phoniness of this predigested psychobabble is underscored by the soundtrack (imagine--a play with a soundtrack!), which features such luminaries as Sting, U2, Live, and Counting Crows. Despite its occasional flashes of loveliness, "Savage Love" limps along ponderously, bloated by the ostentation of the same culture that it attempts to parody--and, ultimately, fails to escape.