Theater Review—

Two American Greats Breathe Great Life Into Westport’s Season Closer

By Julie Stern

WESTPORT — Sir David Hare is one of England’s most respected living playwrights, whose works tackle the large issues of the day, from religion, politics and war to personal morality.

The Breath of Life, currently on stage at Westport Country Playhouse, is one of what Hare calls his “smaller plays,” in that it focuses on one 24-hour period in the lives of two characters. Yet this short glimpse manages to reflect the larger social and political issues that shaped their entire lives.

Director Mark Lamos has gotten masterful performances from two great American actors — Jane Alexander and Stockard Channing — in this drama about the confrontation between two women, who for 25 years shared one man — a man who has since dumped them both, and run off to America to start a new life with a new young lover.

The time is 2002, and the play is set in an apartment on the Isle of Wight- off the south coast of England, where retirees go in search of warmth; think of it as a British counterpart to Florida. (Michael Yeargan’s richly detailed set is worth the price of admission alone.)

Frances Beale (Ms Channing) has come demanding to see Madeleine Palmer (Ms Alexander). Their meeting  is fraught with tension and free-floating hostility. It isn’t clear what the problem is, but it is definitely connected to “Martin,” who has moved to Seattle, where he is practicing law and building an ecologically appropriate glass house on an estuary, shrouded in pines.

Martin never appears on stage, but clearly he is at the center of both women’s discomfort. The history between the three eventually works its way out.

Now they are both of a certain age — Madeleine is over sixty, and Frances somewhat younger — and both are alone (Frances’s children have grown and left the nest). Frances is using the pretext of writing a memoir about the Sixties and Seventies in order to explore what happened in all three of their lives.

Frances falls asleep on the couch and misses the last ferry back to the mainland, leaving the two women to talk late into the night. Their initial bitterness gives way to curiosity and tentative rapprochement as each one tries to explain herself to the other.

What comes out of these somewhat lengthy discussions — besides the fact that (to the audience at least) Martin is an immature, narcissistic jerk — is a rather sad insight: The idealism of the Sixties has, like the characters’ youth itself, been tempered and diluted by compromise. In their personal lives they wanted true and total love, but settled for what seemed to be the best deal they could get.

Hare’s underlying theme is that so many idealistic goals and dreams succumb to just this sort of unsatisfactory bargains. Given the hopes raised by the 2008 election, that we might transform health care, restore social and economic justice, halt global warming and bring peace and freedom to the world, he seems to be predicting that we will be seeing a lot of the same old, same old, even as in the realm of personal relationships,  people are substituting “hooking up” for real commitment.