'Sex With Strangers' at George Street Playhouse ultimately unfulfilling

The play, by 'House of Cards' writer Laura Eason, is about two snowed-in writers whose carnal relationship turns emotional Watch video

Laura Eason's play "Sex With Strangers," running through March 27 at New Brunswick's George Street Playhouse, opens with the provocative concept suggested by its title, but moves quickly to the more complicated situation of sex with an increasingly familiar and intimate partner.

As the freedom of casual sex quickly gives way to the investment in another person, Eason explores the challenges of a mismatched couple struggling to find common emotional ground in a relationship that will prove little more than mutually self-serving.

This is a play with plenty of sex and lots of conversations about its two characters' lives, but it is not really about either of those topics. It is about the development of and turmoil surrounding an emotional relationship, the hasty germination of which is flawed by the lovers' selfish desires. Both may want the other, but only for the plugging of holes in their own fraught psyches.

The play seems to want the anxiety of its second half to rest on questions of blooming love, but it becomes difficult to be compelled by self-interested characters' angst when it is packaged as concern for another.

The play opens in a remote and cozy bed-and-breakfast (Jason Simms's sets are lovely, and on opening night the act-two set change earned well-deserved applause), where novelist Olivia (JoAnna Rhinehart) has holed up to get some secluded writing done. She is interrupted by the late-night arrival of young, brash, blue-haired Ethan (Kyle Coffman), himself a writer of some notoriety who has come to woodsy Michigan in the hopes of completing a project. The two very different people clash initially, but it is scarcely 20 minutes before the play dramatizes its title.

Ethan has gained fame from a blog-turned-book-turned-film-project called "Sex With Strangers," the product of a bet with friends that he could bed a new woman every week for a year. Olivia is a professor with a highbrow novel now out of print and a bevy of confidence issues curtailing the completion of her second book. These two could not stand further apart on the writers' common ground, but the rub is that Ethan has read and loved Olivia's book (a memorized and recited quote is the final ingredient precipitating the pair's first trip to Olivia's offstage bedroom).

Ethan has designs on a literary career after leaving behind what he claims to be a constructed persona of sex-crazed misogyny, but Olivia struggles to distinguish the person from the persona.

Snowed in with no television or internet, these two have little trouble passing the time, and it is here that Eason asks us to recognize the growth of a relationship that will transcend physicality and engender the kind of deep emotional connections that lead in equal parts to giddiness, longing and fear of betrayal.

Although Coffman and Rhinehart each do fine work constructing their characters, the development of their shared devotion is never clear. The play seems to suggest that their bond forms around a love of literature -- Ethan wants to be a respected writer; Olivia admires his ambition; Ethan believes in Olivia despite her lack of confidence; Olivia appreciates his support -- but just below the surface of that bond is each character's desperation to be legitimized by the recognition of the other.

What we are left with is a vulnerable woman wooed by a man slick enough to take a different approach to her than to drunk party girls, but self-deluded enough to think Olivia is more than a talisman of the life he wants to lead. This tension between the desire for self-fulfillment and the need for another person to complete that process can make for great drama (as it does regularly in Eason's work on Netflix's "House of Cards"), but "Sex With Strangers" seems as duped as its characters are that its central relationship has a hope of developing.