Disconnected The measure of misery in The Blue Room BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	The Blue Room By David Rabe. Directed by Nigel Gore. With Melissa Penick and Luis Astudillo. By New Stage at Firehouse Theater through May 14.

As a play, The Blue Room has its problems — how are we kept interested in 19 characters who go away soon after we begin to get interested in them? New Stage gives it a brave try at Newport’s Firehouse Theater, directed by the adventurous Nigel Gore.

Its original German title means roundelay, but the play has more often been described as a daisy chain — 10 blackout sketches of sexual encounters continue with one of the participants appearing in the next scene. Casual dalliances, infidelities, sexual exploitations, regretted couplings, the last scene links to the first — through a no-longer cheerful young prostitute a year later. Luis Estudillo and Melissa Penick are the two-person cast.

This is a free adaptation — read modern language and AIDS awareness insertions — by David Hare of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1896 Der Reigen. The Vienna police closed down a 1921 production for obscenity, and actors appeared in court and onstage when a Berlin production was attempted later that year. Max Ophuls put his version, La Ronde, on the screen in 1950. Hare’s update hit London’s West End in 1998, a sensation because of Nicole Kidman’s pre-Eyes Wide Shut baring-all rather than for literary merit.

The nudity is still here, in one scene, which the mostly older opening night audience took rather well, I thought. But, oddly, that is not an equal-opportunity component. Presumably at least some of these depicted men are not shy. And both the director and the actor have gone the full-frontal route at Alias Stage when the play required it — Estudillo in 1994 in The Swan and Gore two years later in Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Through the Leaves, which he and Kate Lohman took to New York. I don’t care what they do in West End theaters, Providence deserves . . . er, more.

Projected above each scene is its location, such as "the kitchen of a modern house in a well-off part of town." Also announced is the time it takes for the sex, of which only the preliminaries are presented. Yes, there is some humor with that, especially the inevitable "0," after which a student moans about his temporary impotence with a married woman in a hotel room. ("You did say you wouldn’t do anything," she cracks.)

The Blue Room lives or dies on our getting into the heads and hearts of these people, in visceral empathy. That’s the real play. Otherwise what’s left is a lot of action and self-justifying speechifying that the characters would acknowledge is meaningless. Astudillo conveyed some of these men well. As a politician speaking thoughtfully to his wife in their bedroom, he was meditative more than smug when speaking proudly of their marriage to his recently adulterous wife, feeling sorry for couples for whom "bed is the only place of contact." And his taxi driver is the model of a male calloused by a knockabout life on the streets. But mostly there is too little emotional illumination of these men. We see the lust of the college student who takes advantage of his family’s underpaid, overworked au pair, but not the entitled attitude that obliviously permits him to interrupt his seduction target to tell her to get him a glass of water.

Penick provides emotional shadings to spare. Aided by the fact that she doesn’t have to play emotionally repressed men, she becomes distinctly different people as the scenes demand. She doesn’t play the yearned-after theater actress as stagy, but rather differentiates her from other characters, giving her intelligence and dignity. It was easy to contrast her giggly, drugged-up 17-year-old model from the sober person who woke up the next morning. But the needy prostitute of the opening came across in the last linking scene not only as subdued, but also with a world of unspoken hurt that has wised her up.

That bright-eyed young hooker is not only world-weary by then, she has been asked by the harshly uncaring taxi driver of the first scene to marry him. She doesn’t seem interested. Like the others here, they have been burned rather than forged in the furnace of passion.

Hare has stated that Schnitzler’s play is about "the gulf between what we imagine, what we remember, and what we actually experience.’’ In other words, the real voyeurism here is our watching people as they obliviously go about making themselves miserable, seeking a Holy Grail but having to settle for orgasm, if that. An ancient Roman expression held that all animals are sad after sex. In some circles, or sexual carousels, not much has changed. In Latin, German, French, or English, the verb for "to connect" doesn’t parse as simply as it should.