Heart to heart

Skylight illuminates a stormy relationship

by Jeffrey Gantz

SKYLIGHT. By David Hare. Directed by Kate Lohman. With Nigel Gore, Jeanine Kane, and David Edison. At Alias Stage through May 17.

Hollywood should learn the trick. The most intense dramatic action doesn't require car chases or gunfire exchanged -- it can consist of two people in a room battling for the moral high ground. Ibsen loved to do it. Strindberg couldn't do anything else.

And David Hare does it well in his 1997 Tony-nominated Skylight, which is getting a magnificent production by Alias Stage.

This is standard territory for Hare, best known for Plenty. It's another dissection of the decline of British society, contemporary values winkled out and examined for signs of pathology.

At first glance, the roles of those who are virtuous and those who are not appear clearly assigned. Eighteen-year-old Edward Sargeant (David Edison) has come bearing gifts, all abashed and sweet as he visits Kyra Hollis (Jeanine Kane). She was the family's babysitter three years before and a close friend of them all, as well as a worker in his parents' London restaurant. Kyra appears to be the selfless sort that makes canonization committees beam. Her dominating characteristic is that she relentlessly cares for others before herself. Kyra has kept on teaching East End kids long after others have burned out, including one woman who came home to find her cat baked in her oven.

In stark contrast is Edward's father Tom (Nigel Gore), a gruff and blunt-spoken entrepreneur, the owner of the restaurant where the now estranged Kyra had worked. Edward had come to ask her to contact Tom, who has been depressed for the year since his wife died of cancer. He soon shows up in his expensive clothes and brash manner and proceeds to suck all the oxygen out of the room. Tom is an unabashed sexist, honest enough about that to wave off the first-date attentive listening ploy since "listening is halfway to begging -- they either want you or they don't."

But where a lesser playwright would leave the contrast at that, Hare shows that each person contains some of the other's character, like a yin-yang symbol.

Despite their 15-year age difference, Kyra and Tom had been lovers until his late wife found out. We might expect such a betrayal of Tom, but Kyra? How could she justify such an action toward a woman who made her one of the family? Is Kyra now rational about it or simply rationalizing?

So we come to see her from Tom's point of view. He's appalled that not only does she work in a slum school, but she also commutes to a freezing slum flat. What kind of Freudian denial and compensations are behind this? Her background is middle-class, and she's enough of a scholar to be teaching at a university. Does she love people so intensely because she won't commit to a single person, such as him?

Hare hardly beatifies Tom, but humanizing him is a sufficient challenge. His virtues are essentially those of a hard, enterprising blue-collar worker who made good -- the kind that build nations. He's ruthlessly honest with Kyra, even though he knows that each argument might end a chance at reconciliation. Under Kate Lohman's skillful direction, Gore is very good at modulating the emotional ups and downs of his impassioned exchanges.

The same can be said of Kane, whose volatile Kyra is entirely convincing. This is Kane's meatiest role yet at Alias, and she is terrific. Kyra could be played at either extreme on the emotional spectrum, from fragile to diamond hard. Kane has found a blend that helps every action and decision of Kyra's assemble into a real person.

Between the two of them, an Act I closing that could be merely sentimental is instead truly heart-rending.

It's a testimony to the standards at Alias this season that an incidental character who frames the play in the opening and concluding scenes, Tom's teenage son, is performed so engagingly by David Edison that you don't want him to leave the stage.

Thought-provoking argument is the meat here, as it was in David Mamet's Oleanna and so many plays by G.B. Shaw. If you do good for self-centered or neurotic reasons, should you not be admired? If you do good that is a consequence of your selfish motivation, should you be commended?

Mill about at intermission. Discuss it amongst yourselves.