French twist URI’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Les Liaisons Dangereuses By Christopher Hampton. Directed by Alan Hawkridge. With Kyle A. Maddock, Jacyln G. Marfuggi, Tiffany Page, Jenette Delmonaco, and Brad W. Kirton. At URI Theatre through February 26.

Decadence is as fascinating from the outside as it is compelling on the inside, whether soap opera or family gossip. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton’s masterful adaptation of the 1782 French novel, is getting a polished, if problematical, production by URI Theatre.

As we follow the machinations of two aristocrats ruining lives for sport, we hear the distant drum roll of approaching comeuppance as well as clattering tumbrels. (Martha Stewart and the Donald should tour in a reading of this, a kind of viperous Love Letters.)

Close friends and co-conspirators, Le Vicomte de Valmont (Kyle A. Maddock) and La Marquise de Merteuil (Jacyln G. Marfuggi) used to be lovers. This fact provides a tension that eventually builds to a snapping point. She wants him to do a simple favor — seduce a convent-fresh virgin who is betrothed to a more recent former lover, thereby rendering him a laughing-stock. (The favorable opinion of other aristocrats is the only good that exists in this milieu, they are amused to acknowledge.) Valmont refuses, not wanting to waste his time on a trivial conquest. "I have my reputation to think of," he tells Merteuil.

The challenge that piques his interest is the famously virtuous Mme. De Tourvel (Tiffany Page), whose husband is conveniently out of the country and who, even more conveniently, is a guest at his aunt’s estate. Valmont says he wants the excitement of watching her betray everything important to her.

Some of the characters here are both well-cast and well-acted. The innocent victims are the most thoroughly inhabited, as befits an almost entirely college-age cast. As the target Tourvel, Page provides intelligence in parrying away Valmont’s advances, which helps us keep interested — we wouldn’t care as much about the plight of a fool. Speaking of fools, there is that gullible and eventually seduced virgin; Jenette Delmonaco makes up for the flat simplicity by providing gleeful enthusiasm at Cecile Volange’s sexual awakening. Darker and double-dimensioned is Merteuil’s young lover, Le Chevalier Danceny, whom Brad W. Kirton makes quite convincing in both of the character’s emotional extremes: love-smitten trust and red-eyed rage at being betrayed.

As the cold manipulatress Merteuil — who says that for fun she prefers cruelty to betrayal — Marfuggi does manage to enlarge the character somewhat, letting us glimpse a flinty heart now and then. Toward the end, we most clearly see that vulnerability to Valmont. Their exchanged ultimatums are like gloves smacking faces, and we understand that he is as helpless, ultimately, in her hands.

That and a later scene showcase Maddock’s best acting here as well, demonstrating that he can do good work. Unaccountably, in the early encounters with the reluctant Mme. De Tourvel, he is allowed to play Valmont all nudge-nudge-wink-wink, like we’re in on a joke. This fizzles away the considerable power Valmont’s seductiveness can provide. Hampton’s play can blow us back in our seats like a Memorex commercial if we, knowing Valmont to be a cad, get to watch him as the epitome of sincerity — as Tourvel is seeing him. Ah-ha — that’s how consummate liars do it, we can gasp. Les Liaisons Dangereuses isn’t bedroom farce, it’s blood sport.

The University of Rhode Island production is being staged in the big black box that is Studio J, which allows us to sit in bleachers on two sides of the characters like jurors. Costume designer David T. Howard not only provides properly lacy period dress, he has been tapped to design the set, which is just right for this high-ceiling space. There are facing doorways in tall walls that have paintings, whose colors are muted so as to not distract, hung way up. High culture did, in fact, look down on such proceedings.

The play is based closely on the epistolary novel of the same name by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. His father was a landless nobleman, a government official, so the author had an insider’s perspective on the amoral types that he depicted. New to late 18th-century literature was a female libertine, a Donna Juan, such as Merteuil. In his 1986 play, Christopher Hampton provided us quite a service by lifting these vile creatures out of their scribblings and into these vivid face-to-face confrontations.