Review: 'Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?"

As the years go by, the scintillating and scary plays of Caryl Churchill get more concise. They also get more appalled.

In 2004, Sam Shepard was lured back onstage for the first time in 30 years by "A Number," the British playwright's lean 65-minute thriller about cloning and the real value of a person. Two years earlier, Frances McDormand was in "Far Away," which, in hardly more than an hour, led us to the global surrealism of genuine world war.

Now, the quietly furious - and furiously seductive - "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" has upped the apocalyptic specificity to a half-century of Anglo-American politics and reduced the running time to just 45 minutes.

Some may be tempted to apply a dollar/time ratio to the investment in the chilling two-character experience, which opened last night at the Public Theater in co-production with London's Royal Court Theatre. Some - OK, perhaps more than some - might be offended by Churchill's indictment of America (with Israel underwing) as the attractive puppet master of England and of world agony. For anyone who wants a warning attached to provocative theatrical adventure, consider yourself warned.

Two men sit on a conventional mustard-colored sofa in the middle of darkness. Although we tend not to notice except during blackouts between short scenes, James Macdonald's production is framed by the tiny lights of a show-biz marquee.

One fellow, called Guy, confesses to be "drunk enough to say I love you ... not that I don't still love my wife and children but ... " Although a program note describes him as "a man," his more dashing companion, named Sam, is described as "a country." Guy has a British accent and tweedier clothes. Sam, dressed casual, is a Yank.

He is also clearly Alpha Dog in this love affair. And, make no mistake, this is a love affair. Guy does leave his family to go, as Sam says as a tempting question, "anywhere you wouldn't?" and to do "things you won't do?"

And what would that be? You know all those articles you wish you'd clipped over the years, the ones that expose disparate and horrible revelations about American foreign policy and the ones that merely make alarmingly good cases for what we tend to lump together as paranoid conspiracy theories?

It feels as if Churchill did clip and keep track of the stories. Instead of dramatizing just one or two, she puts them all together - from Vietnam to Iraq - in the fragmented bits of intimacies and estrangements of a relationship over time.

Sam ( Scott Cohen) doesn't have to say more than "same trucks can deliver the arms and take the heroin back" for our collective political consciousness to finish the sentence. Guy (Samuel West) need not say more than " CIA's health alteration committee" for the mind to fill in the horror. The men thoughtlessly drop their trash into the darkness. Their sofa floats higher between every scene.

Churchill's 1982 feminist satire, "Top Girls," finally opens on Broadway this spring starring Marisa Tomei and Martha Plimpton. But isn't it time for a Churchill festival?

DRUNK ENOUGH TO SAY

I LOVE YOU? By Caryl Churchill, directed by James Macdonald. Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Ave., through April 6. Tickets: $50. Call 212-967-7555. Seen at Saturday afternoon preview.

Related topic galleries: Martha Plimpton, Frances McDormand, Sam Shepard, Scott Cohen, Central Intelligence Agency, Marisa Tomei

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