Orange Flower Water
New Century Theater Company, 2009
Written by Craig Wright
Scenery by Matthew Smucker
Lights by Geoff Korf
Costumes by Melanie Taylor Burgess
Sound byRobertson Witmer
Deftly directed by Allison Narver and fearlessly acted by a brilliant cast, the play leaves its audience emotionally exhausted yet intellectually exhilarated.
His play opens with a love letter to David from his wife. It closes with a love letter from David to his daughter. In between, we, the audience sit in judgment. Who’s guilty? Can anyone be said to be innocent? What power does religion have in all this? Can reality ever truly mirror our dreams for it? Can passion really last, and if not what are you left with? How do we weigh our responsibility to ourselves against that to others?
The cast mesmerizes its audience. The red-hot lovemaking is luscious. The fights are blistering. The pain is palpable, and the ecstasy is sybaritic. Most action takes place on or around the bed that’s the central item on a nearly bare but elegant stage set. Yet even when the characters step away from the bed — such as to cheer their children at invisible soccer matches — their nervous gestures, awkward tics, and thrusts and parries couldn’t be more perfect.
Orange Flower Water is as intimate as a nasty argument heard through a motel wall. This time, emotions rather than ideas provide the elephant in the room, creating that creeping truth no one wants to face. As for stagecraft, the set couldn’t be more minimalist: Four chairs sit in four corners while a single bed looms in the middle of the room. The effect is stunning. All of a sudden you’re ringside at a grudge match in which the losers forfeit marriage, home, children, and trust in that person they’ve been sleeping a pillow away from for more than a decade.
Director Allison Narver makes such astute casting choices that it seems she could have just handed out scripts and the show would have directed itself. But look closer and you can see her work. These characters stalk and retreat from each other in infinite combinations, and there’s an ebb and flow that leads inexorably from the mundane mediocrity of normal life through the turbulence of the affair to what becomes the new “normal” for them. It’s a bleary dawn of ex-wives and husbands, unsteady couplings, possibilities, and a gnawing uncertainty that any of it will last.