A sharp examination of sex, love, and isolation in the impersonal landscape of modern life, and the lengths we will go simply to feel closer.

‘Try lying for a change, it’s the currency of the world.’

A failed novelist, a photographer, a stripper, and a dermatologist become intimately bound in one another’s flesh, playing a brutal game of love, lust, and deceit. One Question Theatre presents Patrick Marber’s a claimed drama Closer, July 19th-22nd at The Meteor Theatre at 7:00pm – tickets are $25 full/$20 unwaged.

Closer charts the lives of Dan, Alice, Anna, and Larry over the course of five years as they use one another to divest themselves of their emptiness. In a chance meeting after a car accident, Dan, an obituarist with pretensions of becoming a writer, encounters Alice, a stripper turned New-York runaway. Their relationship deepens as Dan harvests lurid details of Alice’s disordered life as raw material for his debut novel. On the verge of publication, Dan’s eye wanders to Anna, a headshot photographer, whom he fixates upon, stalking her studio-apartment, and roleplaying as her in online chat-rooms. His playing-pretend steers Anna into a romance with Larry, a volatile dermatologist who’d sooner see Dan desolate than secede Anna to him. The four descend into prolonged psychological manipulation, deploying sexual stratagems, exploiting fears and vulnerabilities, and battering each other with lies and truth.

A sharp examination of sex, love, and isolation in the impersonal landscape of modern life, and the lengths we will go simply to feel closer.

One Question’s season of Patrick Marber’s Closer is a community theatre production by special arrangement with Samuel French Lts, and The Play Bureau.