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Slideshow: The Slutcracker

Theater

Unkindest cuts

Yes, you’ve seen and heard it all before, but Rebeck’s play does feature some bravura set pieces and worthy screeds, among them an almost Wagnerian one by Charlie, swigging vodka from the bottle, after a humiliating lunch with a former friend, now a Hollywood success, who’s dangling the carrot of a bad television pilot. And Clea is an intriguing combination of blond ambition and idiot savant still jiggling her way toward optimal hardness. At the Lyric, that hardness is reflected in Janie E. Howland’s abstract set, a minimally furnished thing of glass and hanging mirrors.

To flawed Charlie, the terrific Jeremiah Kissel brings a raging energy that’s both offputting and seductive — and that just might attract the much younger Clea, if only to play with fire while waiting at the back door of an opportunity. Georgia Lyman (a friend of mine) takes full advantage of a vamp more vital and contradictory than the one she played in The Women. One of the senseless things her character — a dingbat vigorously coupling with a piranha — likes to say is that people are being “reactive.” And though Lyman brings a wow-spouting spontaneity to Clea’s abrupt persona, she is at her best reacting. Julie Jirousek captures the underlying vulnerability in Stella, inadvertently beating her husband down with her high-powered competence, and Barlow Adamson is more likable than sleazy as the underwritten Lewis, humane male on the make. The quartet can’t turn The Scene into Of Human Bondage. But their dance does demonstrate the allure of glittery surfaces and the inconvenience of a soul.

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