Face it, Paris Hilton is our cultural Zeitgeist. Even if you've never seen one of her "movies" or heard one of her "songs," you know who she is. The question is: why?
Theresa Rebeck's play "The Scene," now at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, explores the ramifications of this overwhelming fascination with meaninglessness, taking on what she sees as America's cultural disintegration in the form of leggy vapidity. Part clichéd melodrama and part social polemic, "The Scene" is ultimately an ironic love letter to a culture deeply invested in the art of self-absorption, albeit one that offers minimal insight into the problem.
Charlie, an out-of-work actor in New York City (when was the last time you heard of a play about a successful, working actor?), finds himself disillusioned with the prospect of playing the games necessary for success in showbiz. Like any other rational middle-aged schlub, he is tempted by the beguiling blonde Clea and soon leaves his hardworking wife in order to shack up with a beautiful idiot.
In other words, this is a play about narcissism on a grand scale. One might even call it an ode to whining, since that is what the characters spend most of their on-stage time doing. As Charlie, Boston theatrical force Jeremiah Kissel, who is wise to leave last year's dismal "Persephone" off his resume, does an admirable job bringing to life a character whose disappointment in all aspects of his life is palpable.
There are times when his portrayal seems distinctly one-note, or at least a little too obvious. For most of the play, he is at an extreme level of anger that seems too superficial for a supposedly sensitive artist. His wife, Stella, is also too simply constructed, which becomes explicit as she becomes the emasculating force in Charlie's life.
If this all seems like timeworn subject matter, that's because it is. It is no longer provocative for a woman to work and even to earn more money than her husband, although it may very well be quite rare. Adultery is no longer sexy, either. This is not 1965; we know it happens every day, and the way in which this play sensationalizes the relationship between Charlie and Clea reeks of passé dogma. It may titillate the octogenarian contingent that is an admittedly large presence on the Boston theater scene, but the few awkwardly-inserted scenes of simulated comic sex add little to the story.
Actually, they do add something quite important, namely the music playing over the sex scene: Paris Hilton's version of "Do You Think I'm Sexy?" It serves to bring the connection between Clea and the publicity-hogging heiress to the foreground. Clea starts out as a caricature of effervescent vulgarity, rattling off empty buzzwords like "reactionary" and incorrectly using "surreal."
Georgia Lyman is utterly incandescent as the deceptively profound Clea, managing a feat of nuance that is quite special. From the very first words of the play, spoken in her high-pitched, neo-Valley Girl parlance, Lyman holds the audience in rapt astonishment as she unveils Clea's dark core. Happily, she avoids a simple "pretty girls can be smart" moral that is distinctly Witherspoonian by making the dichotomy murky at best. We can never fully dismiss Clea as an airhead, just as we cannot fully embrace her oddly insightful bon mots.
She is a marvelous (and hilarious) conundrum. What both Lyman and Rebeck have created is nothing short of an iconic role, a sort of Queen Elizabeth I for the 21st century. As Stella puts it, "She looks good in black and can't speak the English language. She'll go far in New York."
Julie Jirousek and Barlow Adamson, who play Charlie's wife and best friend, respectively, are the clear weak links in the cast. As the buddy who eventually comes to the rescue of the heartbroken Stella, Lewis is a pitifully thankless role; he is given no backstory and no big speech. Still, Adamson commits the cardinal sin of being too prepared, as more than once he waits quite obviously for his lines. What's more, he is hopelessly bland, a practical non-entity on stage.
That the play ends without answering the question of Clea's appeal is both frustrating and the only real choice, for it is up to the viewer to decide where her power lies. At best, she is a powerfully emblematic icon, and at worst, an entertaining caricature. For an entertaining showcase for this persona, one could do worse than "The Scene."
