Three faces of Edna
Edna O'Brien's vibrant Triptych suggests a portrait of the artist as a Jungian.

By Robert Avila

ON THE SURFACE , Irish novelist and playwright Edna O'Brien's Triptych is about three women in love with the same man; the three being his American wife (Julia Brothers), his teenage daughter (Tro M. Shaw), and his Irish mistress (Lise Bruneau). The object of devotion, Henry, is a famous Irish writer-playwright living in New York City, brilliant and suave, with graying temples and expensive shoes. That's what we're told about him, anyway. And as we never see him, there's no reason not to form a picture of the consummate lady-killer.

What we do see, in director Paul Whitworth's engaging world premiere presented by the Magic Theatre, unfolds as part domestic drama, part poetical allegory, and part postmodern psychoanalysis. The women vie for sole possession of Henry's affection in a series of forays, temporary alliances, betrayals, even empathetic gestures – all broken up by moments of introspection and emotional collapse. Pleasure and pain tumble together in a tumult driven by desires affirming and self-destructive, played out within, as well as between, each character. Kate Edmunds's stage design (a triplet of rooms set into, and nearly swallowed by, a pitch-black background) evokes this mental nightscape, autumnal and urban in tone, as when a city riddled with lights seems barely able to stave off the encroaching darkness.

But in addition to being darkly passionate, O'Brien's work is playful, and in more than one sense: it's witty, brimming with literary allusion, and, not least, built so as to call into question the very meaning of the play itself. For though she draws her characters vividly (and three strong performances, under Whitworth's intelligent direction, bring them appealingly to life), there's a way in which each necessarily completes the other. The program hints at some archetypal subtext by identifying them impersonally as Wife, Mistress, and Daughter – though they have names in the play – as if they were merely objects or ciphers.

The fact that the mistress is an actress only reinforces the symbolism, pointing to a deeper structure just below the surface of the action. The play tacitly identifies her with the roles of classic heroines – the Duchess of Malfi or Chekhov's Arkadina – while combining their self-referential significance with the vengeful wife's stalking of the mistress backstage and out among the audience, further blurring the line between theater and "real life." (The mistress's name, Clarissa, may suggest yet another paralleling, this time with the eponymous heroine in Samuel Richardson's 18th-century novel.)

That Henry the playwright would have an actress for his mistress is therefore, under the circumstances, far from a banal detail, since an actress is a single woman reinvented in endless guises. There's a neat meaning here (Henry, we learn, has had a series of mistresses), but a larger one as well, especially when we hear of his lamenting how, for him, each "new and wonderful woman ... always turns out to be the same bloody woman in a different costume."

If Henry sees the characters onstage as three faces of Eve, as it were, there's more to this than his own chauvinism. His despair comes from a sense of losing control: his mistress has announced she is pregnant with his child and wants to keep it. Likewise, it's hardly insignificant that his wife (played by Brothers with a mad American pluck) has a pronounced gift for language; or that his daughter is on the cusp of her sexual awakening. Each simultaneously gropes toward and away from the love-object, using her own distinct, gradually self-conscious power.

Beautifully written, arrestingly at times, and laced with pungent humor, Triptych can still be unevenly persuasive theatrically and generally draws its best moments from the interactions between the characters, rather than from the shifts to direct address. The play's subtle reflections on love and art, however, engage us well after the final curtain. It's tempting to read Triptych (a term already associated with a work of art) as an ironic form of self-analysis – wherein the artist shapes the chaos of her own personality into a kind of elusive order, one that recognizes its own volatility.

And at least one scene puts the real playwright explicitly, humorously onstage, as the wife and mistress trade passages from O'Brien's short story "Mrs. Reinhardt" before mutually pronouncing it "piffle." But it's clear enough that Henry substitutes for O'Brien at some level, just as the wife, who eventually appropriates her husband's work, stands in for both the fictitious and the real playwright with her sparkling verbal dexterity.

Triptych deftly reexamines the paradoxical relationship between desire and freedom familiar to readers of O'Brien's fiction. But by blending this feverish love story with one about the theater, the play also reflects on a similar dynamic in the creative process itself. Triptych becomes a psychological allegory extending questions about the autonomy of the individual into modernism's long-standing suspicion of the autonomy of the artist, or of a given work of art. By the time we hear of Henry's impotence (he suffers from writer's block – "washed up," in his wife's phrase), it's clear that the wife, mistress, and daughter, rather than the playwright, will have the last word.

'Triptych' runs through Jan. 25. Wed/17-Sat/20, 8:30 p.m.; Sun/21, 2:30 p.m.; Dec. 22-Jan. 25: Fri.-Sat., 5 and 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 p.m., Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, S.F. $24-$38. (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org.