E-Mail This Article to a Friend Disenchanted evening Despite being well done, Life X 3 repeats itself BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Life X 3 By Yasmina Reza. Translation by Christopher Hampton. Directed by David Zoffoli. Set by Jenna McFarland. Lighting by Ken Elliot. Costumes by Adriana Tulian. Sound by Dan Sheppard. With Sandra Shipley, Paul O’Brien, Stacy Fischer, and Ken Flott. At Gloucester Stage Company through July 18.

With its spectacle of a younger couple and an older one imbibing and aggressing, comparison of Life X 3 with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is inevitable. But it’s like comparing a sparrow with an eagle just because both can fly. Yasmina Reza, the French author of this 2000 comedy (which had its Broadway debut last year), also penned the artful Art, a dissection of male friendship played out against an all-white painting, and the exquisite study of disaffection (and the unspoken relationship between author and reader) The Unexpected Man. In Life X 3, which is receiving a polished area premiere at Gloucester Stage Company, Reza’s writing, as translated by British playwright Christopher Hampton, is as sophisticated as usual. But here she really comes closer to Alan Ayckbourn’s clever constructs than to Albee’s bubbling cocktail of vitriol and hooch. The play, intriguing for a while, puts an intellectual gloss on what amounts to a sit-com — one sit, three coms.

In the play, thirtysomething Parisians Henri and Sonia, he an astrophysicist nervous about not having published in three years, she a lawyer working in finance, are lolling on their contemporary furnishings around 9 p.m. of an evening, negotiating with a fretful off-stage six-year-old, when they’re beset by the older, scientifically influential Hubert and his patronized wife, Inez, whom they thought they had invited to dinner the next evening. Sonia is in her bathrobe, Henri is in a panic, Inez is in a snit over a run in her stocking, and Hubert, who lets it drop early that the paper Henri is about to submit on the flatness of galaxy halos has just been trumped by a team of Mexicans, is in an aureole of smugness.

Reza plays out this potentially disastrous scenario in three different permutations (which — my one quibble with the production — director David Zoffoli has chosen to separate with an intermission; it’s like placing two panels of a triptych on one wall and the third across the room). Buckets of Sancerre flow in each rendering, with the only available food Chocolate Fingers and Cheesits — the latter of which Hubert, when not flexing his power by making advances at the possibly receptive Sonia, consumes with such gusto you’d swear they were the finest fromage. Although each vignette exposes the rifts in the two marriages, the three of them play out in variously salvageable displays of incivility. Which makes the point that "life" can go in any number of possibly random directions.

So, is this a trio of cocktail weenies dressed up as philosophic foie gras, or is it really about something? Reza floats some heady themes, with all the talk of galaxy halos adding a cosmic aura to the issue of scientific advancement versus professional doom. (Inez, the bereft soul of the piece, even remarks on the nobility of living among the stars.) You might see the play as a deceptively comic riff on order and chaos — especially if you stare deeply into Inez’s remark that if you give a child a cookie in bed after the tyke has brushed his teeth, "the whole system collapses." Certainly the stylish GSC staging brings out the desperation of the characters better than did the Broadway staging (with Mad About You star Helen Hunt), which began farcically and then darkened.

The success of the production is due in large part to the strength of the performances. But there is also a neat trick in which a geometric painting on the back wall — possibly a homage to Reza’s Art — disappears to show the advance of the already quarreling Inez and Hubert, he informing her that, whatever else is on the menu chez Henri and Sonia, the younger couple will "lick our feet." And Zoffoli keeps things hurtling.

Ken Flott is aptly geeky as depressed scientist Henri, impressively liquor-emboldened in the bridge-burning second scenario. Stacy Fischer, hair in a tight chignon, captures both the brittleness and the social charm of passive-aggressive Sonia (who if she were to sleep with Hubert might be doing so for herself or for Henri). And the homecoming of GSC vets Paul O’Brien and Sandra Shipley, both now based in New York, is an expected treat. The vigorous O’Brien combines in Hubert an ungracious cruelty and a hearty bonhomie; wolfing those Cheesits as if he might also eat the box, he makes the character’s appetites apparent. As for Shipley — oh please come home! The actress’s trilling Inez, swaying on her high-heeled pins in go-for-broke drunken abandon or absorbing her husband’s putdowns like a spiteful sponge of sorrow, is both touching and hilarious.

Still, Life X 3 is not in the same category with Reza’s previous, spare but provocative works. It cruises around the block three times, beaming a different perspective on the same landmarks, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Even with artists on board.