BLUE WINDOW
Bailiwick Repertory
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This doesn’t make the characters any easier to take. Libby, whose dinner party for a group of friends is the focus of the play’s action, is a dithering neurotic whose insecurities, funny at first, make her incredibly annoying by the end of the evening, when Lucas unveils his shocker of an ending. And the guests at her party–less profoundly afflicted than their hostess but full of woes nonetheless–aren’t a whole lot easier to take. There’s a lesbian couple–one’s a writer, the other’s a family counselor, and both are arrogant and domineering. There’s a heterosexual couple–he plays guitar badly and ignores her growing distance, while she thinks out loud about how everyone is looking for connection. And there are two single men: Norbert, a nice, quiet guy who’s giving Libby parachuting lessons and who tries to make love to her after the other guests have left, and Griever, Libby’s friend and fellow group-therapy member, who interrupts her late-evening encounter with Norbert with a series of ill-advised phone calls.
Griever’s name suggests the key to the play: survivor’s guilt. Lucas has acknowledged that in the mid-1980s, when this was written, he was channeling a lot of grief and anger about losing friends to AIDS into his plays even when he wasn’t writing openly about the topic. Blue Window, with its title image paradoxically representing hope and despair, is full of self-accusing sadness, even as it also deals humorously with the pretensions and foibles of arty Manhattanites.
Chesley’s play, seen last summer at the same theater but remounted here with a different director and somewhat different cast, tells of two men who conduct a sexual affair over the telephone. They can’t see each other, but we can see them both; what we know about them is that one, Bert, is young, very handsome, and quite active, while the other, J.R., is paralyzed from the waist down (probably from service in the Vietnam war) and as a result confines himself sexually to masturbation. J.R. initiates the anonymous affair with an obscene call to Bert; Bert is at first nonplussed, but emerges as an eager and able partner in their mutual fantasy trips–until he develops AIDS and stops returning J.R.’s calls. (“I may say oh, oh, oh, oh,” Judy Garland’s voice croons on Bert’s answering machine at the end, echoing the orgasmic sighs he has uttered over the phone throughout the play, “but no one will hear.”)
