Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Bathed in a glow of nostalgia for forties movies, David Gaard's "The File on Ryan Carter" is a beguiling two-hander that riffs equally on Arthur Laurents' screenplay for "The Way We Were," and Laurents' own relationship in the late forties with matinee idol Farley Granger. Granger and Laurents' affair ended badly; as elderly men, they continue to pick at each other in their respective memoirs. But Gaard takes the bare bones of couplings like theirs and does an idealistic re-write, so that harsher realities are obscured in a haze of what might have been. This is a play about two boys who make a couple in the late thirties to the late forties, but they do little agonizing over their identity, and no conventional arguing about their relationship. They have sex with other people, and neither of them is possessive; we see their love and trust for each other grow naturally through the years. Gaard provides just enough realistic detail in their dialogue so that they do seem to be living, breathing boys of their time. People that the boys talk about who we never see, such as a character actor named Shelly Morgan, are fully imagined creations, so that there does seem to be a world outside their two-person seventh heaven.

As Ben Fox, the Katie Morosky campus radical who dreams of being an Odet-sian proletarian playwright, big-eyed Daniel Koenig rattles off old socialist dogma by the yard, but he's always accessible and charmingly earnest, so that we know why Ryan G. Metzger's laidback Ryan Carter is so comfortable with him, even though Ryan, who began life as Henry Hochauser, is an athlete, actor and hedonist who seems to care about no one but himself. As the play goes on, Carter starts to take on some awareness of the political scene around him, so that knowing Fox over time seems to make him a better person (Fox himself wins more confidence after exposure to Carter's breezy carnality). It's a very romantic play in general, given to swooning classical music by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov playing on the radio as the two boys grapple with each other; they always seem to be taking off each other's clothes, but this seems only natural, never prurient. It's a utopian play, and so well-acted by Koenig and Metzger and sensitively directed by Gaard himself, that it creates its own reality based in dreams of the past and a belief in unforced, magical connection between people.