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Close companions {Excerpt}
No Exit, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Little Women
By: CAROLYN CLAY
1/23/2006 12:18:41 PM
The Huntington's Les Liaisons Dangereuses begins and ends with ladies playing a desultory game of cards, but the real sharps are ex-lovers Merteuil and Valmont, whose edgy friendship takes the form of seducing and telling, either for revenge or for the titillating hell of it. Merteuil also has the feminist justification that she is, as she tells Valmont, "born to dominate your sex and avenge my own." She wants her libertine pal to deflower 15-year-old Cécile Volanges (a Sandra Dee-ish Louisa Krause), a vacuous innocent who is engaged to a one-time lover of the Marquise. Valmont may have trouble working that in, however, as he's busy trying to crack the virtue of the Présidente de Tourvel, a young married woman renowned for her piety. The partners in crime have, one presumes, been up to such intrigues for years, but the balance of power is upset when Merteuil perceives that Valmont has fallen for Tourvel. (Not that his passion keeps him from turning young Cécile into a trollop in Wonderland.) And the villains' perfidy does not preclude linguistic volleying yummier than anything they might do in bed, were they to suit up for the sexual joist that is hard-bargained for but blows up at the negotiating table, with tragic results.
Heading up the Huntington cast is film and TV actor Michael T. Weiss, who follows his explosive turn in Burn This with a rakishly commanding Valmont who seems ready to pounce - if not on a woman, then on a nuance. Tasha Lawrence is a resplendent Merteuil who, though her inflections are somewhat lower-crust, conveys the turn of the Marquise's heart from malignant delight to adamancy. And Yvonne Woods's Tourvel communicates both the starch of her high lace collar and the heat beneath.
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