The Paris Letter

Towards the end of The Paris Letter, Jon Robin Baitz puts into his narrator’s mouth a line of such insight that it’s as if a lightning bolt of infinite mega-wattage zaps us from the stage. The piercing remark strikes you between the eyes with a force that causes your eyes to tear up. I won’t quote it here because it must come as fresh and unexpected and revelatory to others as it did to me. I will say that it’s in a league with one of Nick Carraway’s conclusions as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, slows to its melancholy coda: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they have made.”

The devastating utterance in Baitz’s play is made by Anton Kilgallen (John Glover) about his long-time friend and one-time lover, Sandy Sonnenberg (Ron Rifkin). Anton, who’s lost an important restaurant investment and a job as an indirect result of Sandy’s association with the deceased Burt Sarris (Jason Butler Harner), has been explaining to us how matters have led to such straits and telling us where in the scheme of things fits a letter that Sandy recently sent from Paris. The explanation requires his flashing back over 40 years of the relationship with Sonnenberg and requires young Anton (Harner again) and young Sandy (Daniel Eric Gold) to put in lengthy but never long-winded appearances.

Over the course of Anton’s recollections — triggered by a stunning coup de théâtre in the first scene — he outlines his four-month affair with Sandy, which was ended by the latter. He recollects how he nevertheless remained close to the Princeton grad and aggressive scion of money managers. He illustrates how he saw Sandy through a marriage to restaurant owner Katie Arlen (Michele Pawk) and also through a series of surreptitious, unsatisfying dalliances with younger men. Along the way, Sandy leaves damage in his wake and eventually becomes the cause of damage done by others. Living a life that goes against his grain, the prominent but puzzled Sandy doesn’t understand the price exacted by habitual pretense and betrayal.

In brief summary, The Paris Letter sounds like a variation on the 43-year-old Baitz’s enduring theme: How powerful men go wrong and whom they take down with them because of their corrupt actions. Quite obviously believing the old saw about there being a crime behind every fortune, Baitz can’t stop himself from itemizing the forms assumed by contemporary executive-suite malfeasance. But here, the driven playwright isn’t satisfied to root around on the same plateau that he’s explored in such potent, earlier works as Dutch Landscape (eventually A Far Country), The Substance of Fire, Three Hotels, and the underrated Ten Unknowns. Instead, he’s ventured into a new area and has taken an enormous step up from Chinese Friends, his most recent work seen in New York. With great determination, Baitz charges deeper into the bottomless cave of the psyche.

His major concern here is what suppressed homosexuality does to a man. In pressing his point, the openly gay Baitz can appear to be grinding an axe and does occasionally cross the line into melodrama. Nonetheless, the trip makes for galvanizing theatrics because, in his zeal, the playwright has dreamed up a whopping worst-case scenario and put it forth as an object lesson. It might even be said that he’s offering internalized homophobia as the subject of Oscar Wilde’s famous statement that each man kills the things he loves.

Minimizing the soapbox-standing and maximizing the script’s strengths, director-of-the-year Doug Hughes (Doubt) does his usual first-class work with the cast. (He has also corralled set designer John Lee Beatty; lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski; sound designer-composer David Van Tieghem; and costume designer Catherine Zuber, who puts great shoes on the men.) In Ron Rifkin, Hughes has on hand the world’s foremost Jon Robin Baitz player. Rifkin, who became Baitz’s muse 17 years ago, knows inside and out the sort of bastard whom the playwright finds an irresistible source of inspiration. Dealing with Sandy’s gut desires and warped career goals, Rifkin proves that he’s still Baitz’s main man; Jewish savoir faire radiates from him, as does a certain softness around the edges. (The actor is also on target in a brief appearance as young Sandy’s misguided psychiatrist, Dr. Moritz Schiffman.)

Wearing a full beard and a coat that’s meant to look like his last possession, John Glover plays a recognizable strand of homosexual suavity as if he’s done it countless times before — which he has. But Glover is always commanding on stage. As the young Anton and the young Sandy, respectively, Jason Butler Harner and Daniel Eric Gold match the characteristics of their elder selves seamlessly. Gold’s portrait of a boy at war with his inclinations is simultaneously sympathetic and infuriating, while Harner’s Anton has all the flair of the defunct Flair magazine at which he says he once toiled. Gold also has nice innings as Sandy’s likeable stepson; Harner is strong as the blithely ambitious Burt Sarris. Michele Pawk does a smart turn as Katie Arlen and also puts hard-edged gumption into her only scene as Sandy’s pleased-to-be-wealthy mom.

Jon Robin Baitz was labeled “promising” in the early ’80s. He continues to fulfill that promise with fine plays, of which The Paris Letter is only the most recent.