Plays about identity politics don’t come much gentler than Bathsheba Doran’s comedy drama The Mystery of Love & Sex. Charlotte (Gayle Rankin), is white and mostly Jewish, and Jonny (Mamoudou Athie), is black and entirely Baptist. Friends since childhood, they now attend the same college and consider themselves soulmates of a sort. “I mean it’s serious,” says Charlotte to her parents when they visit her dorm room for an awkward dinner. “We’re serious. I can’t live without him. That kind of thing.”
But that kind of thing isn’t as easy as it looks. Charlotte might be queer and she thinks that Jonny may be, too. Yes, they’re comfortable with each other, but is that enough without what Charlotte calls the “white light” of passion? And how are Charlotte’s dad, Howard (Tony Shalhoub), and mom, Lucinda (Diane Lane), going to make sense of their relationship? Even more pressing, how are they going to make a meal of salad, dry bread and cheap wine?
The Mystery of Love & Sex bears more than a passing resemblance to Doran’s earlier play Kin, which presented a couple’s romance refracted through the lens of their family and friends. The cast is smaller here, but the concerns are similar, as are some of the characters – the attention-seeking Charlotte seems a close relation of the needy Helena of Kin.
Both plays explore how we define ourselves in relation to others and how we balance our need for companionship with our sense of who we are and how we ought to behave. Too often you can feel the playwright’s hand stacking the deck – race cards, sex cards, gender cards – but at other times the action plays out sweetly and sympathetically. Clearly, Doran clearly likes to give voice to characters struggling to find theirs.
The production, directed by Sam Gold, who also helmed Kin, may be more elegant than the play demands or deserves, with its gauzy curtains and evocative half-light. Doran’s writing, which you can also see on Boardwalk Empire and Masters of Sex, can sometimes veer toward sitcom, but Gold’s composed staging works against it nicely.
That’s not to say that he demands similar restraint from his actors. Shalhoub has a face built for discontent. Observe the facial contortions as he lowers himself to a cushion on the floor, watch him grimace and sneer and scowl as he attempts to serve himself salad with plastic utensils. Pages of dialogue flit by as he gnaws on a hunk of dry bread. He’s matched by Lane – lovely, if less precise – as Charlotte’s free-spirited southern belle mother, given to flowing blouses and marijuana cigarettes. Rankin is nicely intense as their daughter and if Athie’s performance isn’t quite so definite, at least in the first act, it’s a tough thing to play a character, who is, as Charlotte says, “a locked-up filing cabinet”.
I wish Doran had the courage to give the play a less happy and tidy ending – a group hug, really? – but there are worse things than a playwright with compassion for her characters: black and white, gay and straight, Jewish and Christian, nasty and nice. Well, actually everyone is pretty nice. Let’s just leave them to hug it out.
