Richard Nelson's Madame Melville is a slight, sweet play, a grown-up writer's look back at a long-ago magical night in Paris.

It recalls the moment an idolized teacher's lesson turned personal, a night when sex changed from something theoretical to something to be savored.

Done Off-Broadway two seasons ago with Macaulay Culkin playing Nelson's teenage alter-ego Carl, Madame Melville is now getting an affectionate, mostly effective production in the intimate confines of New Theatre in Coral Gables. Much of its magic flows from Michael McKeever's shabby-romantic set, and from the way Travis Neff back-lights the room's curtained ''walls'' with hues that suggest the warmth of remembered passion.

In one especially delicate scene, director Rafael de Acha underscores the teenager's see-saw from yearning affection to lust.

As Carl (Alex Weisman) sits on a sofa with Claudie Melville (Bridget Connors), his teacher at an American school in Paris, she speaks of her own long-ago moment, when a man who was then her teacher took her to an exhibition of the works of Pierre Bonnard.

She talks about the effect of a certain painting, a painting pictured in a book Carl is looking at. She describes the way it launched a love affair, but as she talks, Carl does not -- or cannot -- look at the picture. He gazes at Claudie, besotted with adoration and longing.

Carl describes his own reenactment of the Bonnard scene after Claudie yields that night to loneliness and her own frustration with a love affair going sour. Whatever one may think of a grown woman seducing a teenager, a teacher seducing her rather willing student, Nelson tells us rather than showing us what happened. So Madame Melville never veers into prurience.

Connors is a confident and sometimes captivating Claudie, a woman who radiates a Parisian frankness about sex. Weisman is capable if not often inspired, quite definitely more a boy than a man, which suggests how inappropriate the liaison is. As Claudie's brash American neighbor Ruth, Barbara Sloan bulldozes with the force of her runaway Jersey girl personality, though she has some funny moments.

Madame Melville, which runs just 75 minutes with no intermission, often feels more like an appetizer than a full-course theatrical repast. But sometimes, a light, gauzy story is satisfying enough.

New Theatre Inc
4120 Laguna Avenue
Coral Gables, FL 33146
(305) 443-5909
Call 305-443-5909.
Performance times
01/04/2003 - 02/02/2003 8 p.m. Wed.-Sat.

Fuente: The Miami Herald
Enero 2003