God is the unseen presence in Craig Wright's intense 70-minute drama, and marriage is the punishment he has invented for hapless mortals.
We're in familiar territory for Steppenwolf's production. Two marriages begin to unravel in small-town Minnesota when football coach Brad (Christian Stolte) discovers that his wife Beth (Whitney Sneed) is having an affair with David (Darrell W Cox), a pharmacist with romantic ideals. Agonised trysts, tearful confrontations, arguments about happiness: this could have been a messy collision between Woody Allen and Neil LaBute, but is so tautly written, and directed with such precision by Rick Snyder that it commands our attention.
In a sequence of overlapping scenes dominated by a revolving double bed, the four characters are paired in different combinations. "Maybe we're all the same person," David's wife Cathy (Molly Glynn) says. Wright suggests that the choices of partner may be almost random, driven by sexual desire that inevitably fizzles out and, in David's case, bolstered by the fantasy that another person can fulfil all his needs. The object of his desire, Beth, is a more sketchy character, a nervy beauty who worries about God's judgment.
When it looks as if David and Beth's relationship will become as mired in disappointment as the marriages they have left, the suggestion that people are interchangeable becomes more insistent. But two crucial scenes undermine the somewhat programmatic intention: Brad's desperate howl of pain when he realises that Beth is really leaving him conveys a depth not previously detected beneath his aggression; and, in a riveting, intimate scene, the betrayed Cathy insists that David has sex with her - a final tussle spurred by anger and grief.
· Until Sunday. Box office: 00 353 91 566577.
