ROMANCE/ROMANCE
The title of a J.D. Salinger story kept ringing in my head as I watched Apple Tree Theatre’s Romance/Romance: “For Esme, With Love and Squalor.” Barry Harman and Keith Herrmann’s musical–actually a program of two thematically related one-acts–is a sordid valentine, offered with love and squalor to audiences too cynical to take romantic notions seriously but too sentimental to relinquish them. Full of graceful music, and played solidly and wittily by a four-person cast under Harman’s direction (he also staged the 1988 Broadway premiere), these one-acts combine chamber-opera delicacy with chamber-pot vulgarity to make for a show that’s simultaneously enticing and repellent.
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Harman’s libretto is based on two short works from the late 19th century: Arthur Schnitzler’s story “The Little Comedy” and Jules Renard’s play Household Bread. The narratives share a subject: how danger and illusion can spark an erotic life dulled by habit and duty. In Schnitzler’s tale a pair of wealthy sexual cynics reinvigorate their lives by posing as impoverished innocents; Harman retains the story’s fin-de-siecle Vienna setting in order to preserve the relationship between class assumptions and erotic attitudes. But he retitles the Renard piece Summer Share and relocates it from 1899 France to contemporary America–specifically to a cottage in the Hamptons inhabited by four vacationing Manhattanites–so that he can contrast the modern characters’ styles with those of their 19th-century equivalents. The unfortunate, and surely unintended, lesson the contrast teaches is that self-absorption and pretension are unattractive in any century.
Complementing the lead performers are Andrew J. Lupp and Pamela Harden, entertaining as a mini- chorus in the first half and appealing as the decent and nervous spouses in the second. Keyboardist Jeff Bell superbly conducts the offstage five-person band; Alan Donahue’s set, Peter Gottlieb’s lighting, and Caryn Weglarz’s costumes are evocative and pleasing.
