Flipped-Out World In 'Breaking Up'

New York Times. December 23, 1990. By Alvin Klein.

YOU might think that he and she are determined to keep a good no, a great -- thing going. Or that they're just as intent on messing it up. Or both.

In "Breaking Up," Michael Cristofer chronicles the rocky two-year relationship of a confused, nameless couple -- every couple? -- who are chronically ambivalent and excessively articulate.

At the beginning, to hear them tell it in overlapping monologues, they were, all of a sudden, on a roll.

"This was it," the man (Matthew Modine) recalls.

"This was really it," the woman (Allison Janney) adds.

As suddenly, it sours, and each is screaming, "I don't want to see you anymore." Later, during one of many telephone scenes, she says, "I know we're not supposed to see each other, but I just wanted to see you."

With a canny gift for comic, circuitous, whimsical rambling, Mr. Cristofer, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play "The Shadow Box" and wrote the screenplay for "The Bonfire of the Vanities," plays with those phrases for which we can find no more apt ones. Nor does he. But the playwright arrives at on-target perceptions and inexplicable contradictions from way off in left field.

"It's the end of a dream, not the end of us," Mr. Modine says wisely, but helplessly.

"Everything else is falling apart, but the sex is getting better," Ms. Janney says, wondering about that.

"Breaking Up," which is being given its world premiere by the American Stage Company, is yet another expression of the contemporary search for complete and lasting contact in a flipped-out universe. Mr. Cristofer has composed a series of bright variations on that all too familiar theme.

Himself an archetype of ambivalence, turning us on while putting us off, he writes with a light touch and a heavy hand that stifles his own work with a self-important air, from the pretentious anonymity of the play's only two characters to a self-conscious evocation of Einstein, Freud and Marx.

Along the way to a cynical, compromising and unsettling conclusion that smacks of inconclusiveness, "Breaking Up" is filled with payoffs, and it's a lucky playwright who gets an actress as worldly and otherworldly as Ms. Janney to deliver them.

She gives an edge to a glib line and dimension to a deeper one. She transports us to the once-upon-a-time of stylish, sophisticated, brainy comedy. Say simply that she's terrific.

In his professional theater debut, Mr. Modine, known for his film roles, is more mundane at mastering the likeliness of the unlikely. But he finds the stage validity and candor if not the range for the character's befuddlement and for that middle-of-the-night panic when he has to run out of the apartment, in flight from the dread word commitment.

With each scene ending in a flash of light and shutters clicking, as if it were a quick take to be preserved -- Mr. Modine plays a photographer -- Stuart Ross's slick and sharp staging would be almost too clinical if the actors weren't so winning.

Kinks and all, "Breaking Up" is off to a head start, with Ms. Janney and Mr. Modine as frantic lovers who use each other up, analyzing everything to its ultimate degree of indecision and suffering the consequences of so-called enlightenment.

"Breaking Up" by Michael Cristofer, produced by the American Stage Company in residence at the Becton Theater at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Route 4 and River Road, Teaneck. Remaining performances are today and next Sunday at 2:30 P.M. and Wednesday through Saturday at 8 P.M. Box office: (201) 692-7744.