British playwright Alan Ayckbourn has long been the theater's champion daredevil, a man who never saw a stage stunt he wouldn't tackle. One of his early works, The Norman Conquests, was a cycle of three plays that recounted the events of a weekend from three different parts of the same house. One Ayckbourn play moves backward in time. Another conflates all the action in a house, from living room to attic, into a single stage space. His ingenious, nearly unstageable Intimate Exchanges has 16 permutations, depending on the choices made by characters at key points in the action.
So the gimmick...