“A Beautiful View” is a verbally dexterous examination of a long-term relationship, with all its positive, negative, predictable and surprising moments. Its basic plot — containing some comedy and some trauma — is credible enough, but as a love story the play fails to convince: its characters are always at arms-length, approaching each other then repelling quickly, their ephemeral emotions making them distant and dispassionate.
Playwright Daniel MacIvor has chosen to tell the story of this love affair through the eyes of two women, Lane and Max, although the play is decidedly not about lesbian relationships. It’s about how human beings reach out to one another, how they understand, misunderstand and often misread one another.
MacIvor begins his tale of the 30-year-long relationship in a camping store where Lane and Max first meet. Although neither woman considers herself a lesbian, they have a sexual encounter, after which the relationship exists in fits and starts, with lots of jobs, cities, happy hours and other people coming between them through the years.
Max is the more talkative of the two women: she’s played with a kind of chatty innocence by Kathleen Coons. Jennifer Mendenhall skillfully plays the more practical, down-to-earth Lane, who tends bar, gets married, then divorced. Both actresses work well together to create a prickly sense of unresolved tension.
In this production, MacIvor directs, using many long pauses, keeping the action shifting physically onstage, emphasizing the erratic nature of the relationship. The lighting, by John Burkland, is extremely effective, particularly during the couple’s first kiss.
Although the text of “A Beautiful View” is intelligent and amusing, indicating that the women are stronger together than when apart, the play’s ultimate impression is of fragility and loss, of intimacy never achieved. The problem is not that the women rarely touch: it’s that they never connect. At the end of “A Beautiful View,” it’s stated, not felt, that time has passed, that love has brought these women together over the span of years. It’s never clear that they got close.
If you go
“A Beautiful View”
Venue: 2ndStage, Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW, Washington
Performances: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 7:30 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 2
Tickets: $39; discounts available
Info: 202-332-3300; www.studiotheatre.org
