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Or it may not. As she demonstrated in her play Kin, which was seen at Playwrights Horizons four years ago, Doran is a playwright who's gifted at looking at old-style relationships in newfangled ways. And for much of The Mystery of Love & Sex, she appears to be setting up her characters' myriad viewpoints on their various entanglements to make profound statements about the degree to which it matters (or doesn't matter) the people we love and how we go about it. Though Doran skirts around the edges of that idea, she doesn't quite go all the way. Neither, ultimately, does the play. What we get instead is a stunning assortment of problems that seem as if they should be a lot simpler to resolve than they are. Is Charlotte (Gayle Rankin) in love with her childhood friend Jonny (Mamoudou Athie), with whom she's going to college? Or is their pairing nothing more than platonic? Could Charlotte actually be bisexual, or even a lesbian, given the odd but inconclusive feelings she's developed for a classmate? For that matter, could Jonny himself actually be gay—or is his still being a virgin merely a byproduct of his devout religious upbringing? Then there are Charlotte's parents, Howard and Lucinda (Tony Shalhoub and Diane Lane). How stable is their marriage? They get along well enough, but they bicker, however good-naturedly, and Lucinda is prone to needing meditation techniques and even an occasional puff of marijuana to cool her nerves. How faithful is either to the other, and is their fidelity relevant in either case? And to what extent does the Jewish Howard harbor a cool attitude toward Jonny because he's black and Baptist? And are the stereotypes that litter his best-selling series of crime novels proof that he's racist, sexist, and homophobic, or that he knows the limits of his genre?
Even after she's done so, however, this is a pretty empty evening that doesn't earn its length of nearly two and a half hours. Doran and her director, Sam Gold, score in the opening scene, in which Charlotte and Jonny throw a dorm-room dinner party for Howard and Lucinda. In addition to revealing just how off-track the younger characters are in terms of caring for themselves and potentially each other, it also shows, with deft comic flourishes, the uneasy give-and-take of personalities and beliefs between Charlotte and her parents: traditionalism failing to mesh with now-prevalent just-do-it attitudes. What happens after this scene, however, is little more than a series of shocks that keeps upending the dramatic tables without lingering long enough for us or the story to absorb the changes. The twists are plentiful, perhaps too much so; there's no way to be surprised by most of what happens, as, after a while, you just come to accept that in another ten minutes you'll see something even zanier. The second act, which digs deeper into the characters, fares better, and becomes more identifiably and relatably human as it examines the outcomes of these constant sexual split decisions. But because a fair amount of the action is also driven by characters we don't meet (primarily two love interests each for Charlotte and Jonny), the concerns seem less real than they do theatrically manufactured, the extent of the emotional havoc wreaked is never as clear as it needs to be. Gold, though usually wonderful at helping actors elicit powerful performances through understatement, is off his game here, likely because nothing, except Andrew Lieberman's uninviting sunroom-meets-shadowy-curtain set, about The Mystery of Love & Sex is understated. Doran's sweeping plot shifts and contrivances require bold acting, and only Lane is working on that wavelength. She's at once big and internal, making Lucinda's ridiculous yoga hand gestures and placating speech patterns the ideal defense mechanisms for a woman who's never been allowed to be herself. After events give Lucinda more freedom, Lane blossoms into full, sympathetic vivacity: a complete woman who revels in the chains she's been able to throw off, and Lane is a pure delight as she makes the journey. Shalhoub is only marginally less successful at working through Harold's complications, and though he's funny in hypercritical mode (when he sees a dish of salad or a piece of butterless bread as a spiritual affront), his forays into dealing with the serious charges of Howard's discriminatory writing are less believable. You want to see both points of view about him, but Shalhoub's approach is too innocent to sell them as equal possibilities. Similarly afflicted are Rankin and Athie, who come across as perfectly friendly but don't convince as confused souls at a crossroads. That's what everyone here is, in one way or another, and if Doran does make that point, it's only one she hits home. How the decisions made and avoided at each juncture transform lives is what will captivate and move us, even if only to laughter, but in the end we see the psychology of the playwright more than that of her characters, and that's not satisfying. The workings of the heart may be complex, and we may indeed be better off giving up and giving in to it. But the lack of insight ensures that, by its end, The Mystery of Love & Sex remains, at best, a mystery, too.
The Mystery of Love & Sex
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