360 DEGREES: A PLAY FOR LOVERS IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL WARMING
Jerome Stauduhar’s “updated” adaptation performed by Cloud 42, 360 Degrees: A Play for Lovers in the Age of Global Warming, will provoke no public outcry, although it should. Not for being immoral–it isn’t (unless you think all bad art is immoral)–but for being silly and superficial. Stauduhar’s initial concept sounds good: an equivalent American assault on hypocritical sexual mores. Unfortunately, 360 Degrees is not that play.
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Stauduhar simply replaces the characters in the original play with American versions of the same people–Schnitzler’s Prussian soldier becomes a cop, his poet becomes a screenwriter, his count becomes a senator–and sets them up in similar scenes. Thus, instead of a scene between a soldier and a whore in which the soldier and the whore end up making love, Stauduhar gives us a scene between a cop and a whore in which the cop and the whore end up making love. That isn’t much of an adaptation, really, especially when you consider how much attitudes about sex have changed over the past 90 years.
To make matters worse, Patrick Trettenero’s direction only accentuates the limitations of Stauduhar’s shallow characters. With a few exceptions, most of the 11-member cast are content to take the easy way out and play their stereotypes straight. Marysia Filipkowski gets a B+ for the wonderful Polish accent of her otherwise colorless nanny character (“I came for the feelm I am going to drop off the Walgreens”). Likewise Kathy Scambiatterra, who works so hard to make her character (the neurotic movie star) interesting it’s exhausting. (Acting shouldn’t be this hard!)
