I Did It for You

One of the few comforting things about the Mystery of Attraction is that the worst has already happened when the play begins—you just won’t know about it for a while. This is small comfort, but in a world where a loan shark’s “collector” waves a human clavicle and says, “The trick is to take the bone while the guy is alive,” it is something.

The simplest event—a man waiting in the garden to say hi to his brother—accumulates such sinister meaning by the end that it leaves you thinking it would be safer to pay close attention to your loved ones’ small talk from now on. The strategy of the play, rather than to surprise you with a twist, is to seduce you into an edgy state in which you are still no better prepared for what will come. There is simply an accumulating sinking feeling that we cannot trust these characters—their accounts, their decisions, their impulses—and that perhaps they deserve what they get. What is uncomfortable, though, is that we still hope for their redemption, because Marlane Meyer has an eerie talent for combining the squalid and the dignified in a single character. These characters have principles— misguided though they may be—and therefore it matters that they might betray them. They are souls that will probably be lost soon, but aren’t quite yet.

“I believe there is a balance and order in the world that we will all have to reclaim for ourselves one day,” Ray says early in the play. “Today is my day.” But Ray is a man with a problem, “a shitty little twenty-grand note,” and a rich man named Roger has offered to clear his gambling debts in return for a rigged trial that will get Roger’s stepdaughter off on a murder charge and allow Roger to marry her now that her mother (his fourth wife) is dead. Incidentally, Roger also claims to know which body part the collector (Bone Daddy) wants to remove from Ray—it’s not his clavicle. While we wait to see if Ray is going to make his stand or cash Roger’s check, the plot slowly accumulates a structure strong enough to render his decision much more complicated. But the structure is so tight that all of the rules of the universe are laid out in this first interaction.

First, family relationships between men and women are hard to define—and always a little dodgy. “She’s like a daughter to me, but she’s not my daughter, she’s my fourth wife’s daughter,” Roger says of his stepdaughter/fiancée in the play’s first line. Later we find out that Ray’s sister-in-law is also his ex-wife.

Second, everyone has another side. We begin with almost no information about the characters: the cast of characters describes Ray as a man “in his late forties,” Warren as a man in his “late thirties,” and Roger as “a businessman in his fifties.” Everything else about them is revealed in conversation. One version of events slowly emerges, and just when your loyalties find a place to stand, the ground shifts. Ray is a gambler in way over his head—and a lawyer. His brother Warren is a drug addict—and a cop—and possibly a child pornographer. Sharky, who “ran that credit card scam that eventually got her popped for grand larceny,” has belonged to Mensa for years, although “she never goes to the meetings.” And Denise, who seems like the biggest dupe of all, is arguably the only one who manages to stand up for herself. There is a characteristic rhythm to the way Meyer reveals these characters. She never delivers these incongruent elements simultaneously. The effect is one not of paradox, but of initial expectation and disorienting revision. (There is also a great deal of humor in these reversals: when Warren starts to have what...