The Mystery of Love & Sex

Review by Kathleen Campion
8 March 2015

The Mystery of Love and Sex is an old-fashioned play. It put me in mind of Talley's Folly and Fifth of July — Lanford Wilson's family dramas built around generational strife, a fracturing of family expectations, and questions of sexual identity.

In the first act, we meet parents Howard and Lucinda, as they arrive for a modest dinner at the dorm rooms of daughter Charlotte and her friend Jonny, from childhood. The parents want to know just how close this friendship is. Charlotte wants to deflect their questions, and Jonny — well, we're not sure what he wants — so he goes out to pick up some butter, leaving those who stay behind free to discuss him.

Howard, a totally conventional Jewish dad, is a crime-fiction writer with a disappointed wife. Tony Shalhoub is the immediately recognizable actor you've enjoyed for years. His Howard is awash in bits of physical business: His back is tight, his bread is dry in his mouth, he folds his smoked turkey. If I were an actor working opposite him, I'd smack him. But he's fun to watch.

The dazzling Diane Lane (Lucinda) never misses a beat with her own comic bits. Her finger-snapping and "breathing," as devices to help her quit smoking, become a running gag that never gets old. Lucinda's stayed too long in this marriage, and stayed for the wrong reason. She sparkles in angry exchanges and warm ones. Lane's performance — more than any of the others — straddles the tragicomic elements of the drama.

The young hero, Mamoudou Athie's Jonny, seems to wrap himself in chastity and Church; he has a problem he cannot resolve until late in the second act. Athie does that really hard thing for an actor: He maintains his conflict and ambivalence for what seems like forever.

The young heroine literally unwraps herself in Act One; she hopes sex with Jonny will "fix" her fear. Gayle Rankin (Charlotte) rehearses all kinds of stratagems to bind Jonny to her. Even in their several pas de deux, she "brings it"; he retreats. Rankin keeps her balance, so to speak. You always believe her.

If Obies were given for most beautiful body seen in a new play, I would nominate Mamoudou Athie. But the nudity in this piece is not about sex; it's about showing vulnerability. And playwright Bathsheba Doran layers in that lovely, childish, I'll-show-you-mine-if-you'll-show-me-yours sensibility, reminding us of all these characters have shared before we meet them.

Except for an eleventh-hour walk-on—little more than a sight gag — The Mystery of Love and Sex is a nicely balanced, four-character play. Though Jonny is not their child, Howard and Lucinda have, in their view, treated him as a member of the family. That he is black seems not to matter... until it does. Doran writes in all the predictable conflicts — father/son, father/daughter, brother/sister, brother/lover, mother/daughter, et cetera. They are all there — but they are not all there is.

As with Wilson's Fifth of July, one could imagine a prequel and a sequel.

(Kathleen Campion)

"'The Mystery of Love & Sex' is written with such compassion, such wry wisdom about the vicissitudes of loving attachments, that I emerged from the theater into yet another frigid day feeling warmed from within."
Charles Isherwood for New York Times

"The play, which marks a celebratory Off-Broadway comeback by Diane Lane, is a well-acted but overstuffed look at another of life's most intricate and intimate puzzles - friendship."
Joe Dziemianowicz for New York Daily News

"'The Mystery of Love & Sex' takes on so much that it could have been titled 'The Mystery of Love, Sex, Racism, Sexism, Religion, Confused Romantic Feelings & Dealing With Your Parents.' Sure, that title would have been a handful, but then so is Bathsheba Doran's new play."
Elisabeth Vincentelli for New York Post

"There's a pulsing, warm sense of lives lived in Doran's script, which unfolds over five years and organically touches on several potent themes, fully humanized: filial betrayal, homophobia, white-liberal microaggression and, above all, forgiveness."
David Cote for Time Out New York

"While Sam Gold's production for Lincoln Center Theater is never dull, Bathsheba Doran's long-winded play lacks cohesion."
David Rooney for Hollywood Reporter

"Watching Tony Shalhoub and Diane Lane execute a comic take-down of super-liberal parents scrambling to keep ahead of shifting sexual mores is a blissful experience."
Marilyn Stasio for Variety

External links to full reviews from popular press...

New York Times - New York Daily News - New York Post - Time Out - Hollywood Reporter - Variety