Contagion: An American Book of the Dead

John Steppling's new play, commissioned by the Alma Delfina Group, started as a one-act written for Pieces of the Quilt. "A Town on the Pakistani Border" has a man called Lew, totally naked except for his shoes and glasses, telling us about his sexual adventures in Asia. He talks in counterpoint with a mysterious Woman, who turns out to be a prostitute. She remembers him, but they never talk to each other. "Why is she talking?" the man asks at one point, and the question's a good one; I would add, "Why are you naked?" and, "When is this prologue over?" But the short play is pretty much all prologue, and so are the other two one-acts Steppling added to flesh out Contagion. In "Mister Chung's Academy of English," a young woman reads from a brochure about teaching English in China. In "Run Across Africa," an American goes for a long jog while his friends talk about their international, cross-gendered love affairs. It all has to do with sex, death, and Americans abroad, but the characters tell their stories instead of playing them out, and they talk past each other with a deliberate, unnatural obliqueness. This is not a new so much as a boring way to write a script. The show does look good, with sharp costumes and a set resembling either a salt-blasted parapet encrusted with shards of bottle glass or a giant white wedding cake. (Limbo? The afterlife?) But Tolstoy said art was "infection" -- of experience and feeling -- and Contagion is strangely sterile.