The deceivers

The truth is elusive in Private Eyes

by Bill Rodriguez

PRIVATE EYES. By Steven Dietz. Directed by John Warren. With Ben Steinfeld, Susan Deily-Swearingen, Jill Blythe Riemer, and Ennalls Berl. At Brown Summer Theater through August 7.

For many years, season-ender at Brown Summer Theatre has been a whodunit. Usually variations on the British parlor mystery, ending with all the suspects gathered around while the murder is exposed. This year Steven Dietz's Private Eyes accomplishes much the same quite brilliantly, but without the customary bloodletting. What gets sleuthed out this time is the death of love. Suspicion and jealousy, betrayal and suppressed rage. An affair that may or may not have occurred, but consequences that in any event are as brutal and final as a dagger in the heart.

Like a murder mystery, this play revels in plot turns and twists, reversals within reversals, surprise. But Private Eyes does not contain the unspoken understanding that we will eventually arrive at the truth. Miss Scarlet may dispatch a victim in the conservatory with a candlestick and be found out. But when a marriage is struck dead even the victim's identity may remain undetermined. When lies cloud the issues, the truth can remain opaque.

A married couple, Matthew (Ben Steinfeld) and Lisa (Susan Deily-Swearingen), are also actors rehearsing a play about marital infidelity. Their suave British director, Adrian (Algernon D'Ammassa), is having an affair with Lisa -- at least that's what Matthew suspects. A waitress named Cory (Jill Blythe Riemer) comes into the picture, although she is not all she appears to be. (She says she is writing a book about the Depression -- no, her Depression, equally worthy of capitalization.) Frank (Ennalls Berl) is a therapist we meet in Act II, and he is also more interesting than you would expect.

Under John Warren's direction, the performances pull us in, the brisk pace sometimes sweeping conversations and events along in its vortex. The shifting web of interrelationships remain clear enough to follow, however convoluted the structure of this engaging and thoughtful psychological drama becomes.

If you're thinking about seeing Private Eyes, read no further. This is the kind of play whose intricate structure and peek-a-boo approach to revealing the "truth" of events and personalities makes discussing details impossible without spoiling its many surprises.

Most striking is how well -- and how frequently -- plot reversals stop us short. In a murder mystery, that's the kind of device where the bumbling Scotland Yard inspector tears off his mustache and reveals himself to be the long-lost homicidal uncle. Here they are reversals of context, the first of which is that we have been watching a play within a play. Such unsettling expectations are especially appropriate in a story about lies and betrayal, since it puts us in the startled position of the betrayed. Well, playwright Dietz doesn't stop at that flip-flop but goes on to reveal the "actual" setting again, and then again. By the time Act I is over, out of the final nested Russian doll emerges a modest psycho-existential revelation: the only reality we can deal with is the one that we, however erroneously, perceive.

Imagine a world in which everyone spoke with absolute honesty -- "it would be barbaric," Matthew observes. Honesty should be, he adds, "a last resort" if the consequences of truthfulness are more harmful than the lie. He believes this, so imagine his dismay at suspecting his wife and his director have been using their private noontime sessions to go over more than her monologues.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Private Eyes is how the holder of the power shifts every time a new setting is revealed. So when we see that the action is "just" a play, the confused and powerless characters suddenly are in thoughtful command, as actors discussing the scene. When Matthew murders the trysting couple and dances on a table top over their dead bodies, he has gone from cuckolded wimp to crazed victor -- then immediately to Walter Mitty, as we see he has merely been recounting his revenge fantasy to his therapist. Dietz examines a fascinating dimension of the adultery power-play dynamic: the one-upsmanship that is potential on both sides, whether it's one confessing contritely and thereby hurting a spouse bitterly, or the other forgiving or holding up the prospect of forgiveness. We can see how some marriages might never be so vital as when they are falling apart like this.

The acting here is fine all around, but Ben Steinfeld is the stand-out performer. In a multi-dimensional role, he fills out the presence of Matthew, informing him with a dynamic range of emotions and responses. Thought-provoking plays like Private Eyes and this talented production are what summer theater should be like more often. There's no mystery about that.