SF Playhouse's The Scene Too Much Like Daytime TV

Unfortunately, this never happens. Lewis' passivity permeates the second half of the play like the trendy-looking, revolving concrete facades of Bill English's stylish, purposefully emotionless sets. Charlie fares little better: He goes from being a hip loser to simply a loser. Clea remains a cliché throughout; her Victoria's Secret model figure, complete with lacy crimson panties, aids and abets her ambition to sleep her way to the top. Stella, on the other hand, embodies a stereotype of a different sort: She's the long-suffering, hard-working wife who, through her husband's actions, is transformed into a martyr. Try as they might, the actors and director fail to find a way around the hackneyed denouement of Rebeck's plot. Making a corny "wife-comes-back-from-the-office-early-to-find-her-husband-in-bed-with-the-blonde" scene work onstage is difficult enough without forcing the actors to deliver lines like "You just threw me away like it was nothing, Charlie!" with a straight face.

In addition to writing such theatrically nuanced stage plays as Omnium Gatherum (a Pulitzer finalist), View of the Dome, and The Butterfly Collection, Rebeck boasts a respected dual career as a TV writer for her contributions to the likes of N.Y.P.D. Blue and L.A. Law. As such, I'd like to think that she deliberately draws on the lexicon of daytime TV in The Scene for the purpose of dramatic metaphor. After all, the play's main themes —the superficiality of modern existence and our obsession with aspirational living over the real thing — criticize the very foundations upon which traditional soap operas are built; namely, viewers' desire to escape their humdrum lives and touch a televised fantasy world of beautiful heiresses arguing paternity rights with wealthy businessmen against a backdrop of warm mahogany paneling and potted yucca plants. SF Playhouse covered similar thematic territory in its 2004-2005 season with an engrossing revival of ART, Yasmina Reza's hit play about the pretentiousness of modern living. That production certainly wasn't hampered by S.O.S. Despite the company's brilliant casting and fluid staging, The Scene ends up looking more like a soap opera than behaving as a critique of one.