 HELLO AGAIN
Book, Music and Lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa
Lincoln Center, Off-Broadway - January 30, 1994 - (65 perfs)
As though seers through the lens of a combination time machine and
bawdy, old-time kinescope the joys of sex are here for the asking in this
adult musical fantasy suggested by Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde.
Synopsis
Ten nameless characters pair up in ten different scenes of sexual
pleasure and/or despair. One character from each scene moves on to the
next, seemingly dumping his old partner in favour of new prey.
The play, begins in 1900 with a Prostitute soliciting an unwilling Soldier:
The next scene takes place in the 1940s, and the Soldier, afraid of dying
in the war, tussles with a sympathetic Nurse. Next, the Nurse becomes
a 1960s dominatrix over her patient, an upper-crust College Boy with wild
leanings. In the 1930s, the College Boy reappears as the impotent partner
of an adulterous Young Wife who can only have relations with him in seedy,
out-of-the-way places. Meeting the woman's Husband in the next scene,
we see why she's been driven to such moral turpitude. In her loneliness,
the Wife dances a haunting pas-de-deux with the mirror image of
her repressed, sensual self: Experiencing the Wife's scene from a totally
different perspective, we then meet the Husband as a closet homosexual.
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