Sex in the Trauma Ward

What turns an actress on? If you're Natasha Richardson, scion of one of Britain's most famous acting families (daughter of Vanessa Redgrave) and trying to carve your own niche on the stage, playing Sally Bowles in a radically revamped version of Cabaret is one sure way. Deciding how to follow up that Tony-winning turn, however, is a tougher call. Richardson twice turned down an offer to join the four-person Broadway cast of Patrick Marber's hit London play Closer. Asked a third time, she thought it over for a weekend and agreed--not because the role promised an acting breakthrough but simply because she loved the play. "Writing like this," she says, "doesn't come along that often."

Closer is a bruising dissection of modern relationships, in which sex is the subject even when it's not, honesty is frequently not the best policy, and people with choices almost always make the wrong one. The play opens with two characters in a hospital waiting room. Alice, who works in a strip club, has been hit by a cab, and Dan, a newspaper obit writer, has come to her rescue. The action never seems to leave the trauma ward as the two pair up with each other and, eventually, with Larry, a straitlaced doctor, and Anna, a stylish photographer.

Marber's icy dialogue has the timing of a TV sitcom and the lonely echo of a prison cell. "Is there anyone you'd like to phone?" Alice is asked in the hospital. "I don't know anyone," she replies. Marber, who doubles as the director, places his characters in pools of light surrounded mostly by darkness. Their isolation is symbolized further by the play's most startling and curious scene: Dan lures Larry into a bogus rendezvous by posing as a sluttish girl in an Internet chat room, their cyberencounter typed out on a giant computer screen onstage.

Closer is such a shrewd piece of contempo-realism that its shortcomings as drama might be overlooked. Marber's tactic of eliding large chunks of time--people meet; in the next scene they've been living together for months--stresses the impersonal power of sex but robs the characters of human dimension. The cybersex scene is clever but seems entirely detachable from the rest of the play. Like a skilled hooker, Closer is satisfying mainly in the moment; as a lasting experience, it leaves something to be desired.

Yet the cast makes it crackle. Ciaran Hinds (the only London holdover) smartly navigates Larry's sometimes improbable swings of temperament; Rupert Graves is pub-crawlingly plausible as Dan; and Anna Friel, as the waifish Alice, is the most appealing new face on Broadway this season. Richardson invests Anna's elegant exterior with shadows of vulnerability, delivers gag lines with dry panache and raises the electricity level just by striding onstage. And yet, amazingly, her star wattage never outshines the ensemble. Now that's a career move.