"But you know what I always notice? ... People don't relate to the words at all. It's as if—in anything, plays, books, movies—it's as if there was something behind the words... Either behind the words or beyond the words."

Thus declares Boo in the Drama Division's fourth-year production of Craig Lucas's Blue Window directed by Martha Banta. An unusual choice for a production, Blue Window is a play without a conventional plot. Nothing happens. It does have a point, though—which the script expresses thoroughly. It also requires—by its structure as well as its theme—an ensemble; this cast definitely is one.

Designer Eric Renschler’s rendering of his set for Craig Lucas’s Blue Window.

Set in New York City, the play starts off with seven characters in five apartments on stage simultaneously. The central character is Libby (played by Holly Troupe), who is simultaneously preparing for a dinner party and rehearsing for the embarrassments in store for her when she tries—too hard—to make conversation with her guests. We meet the guests in their respective apartments as they prepare to go to Libby's. There is Tom, whose ingenuity as a composer remains unknown even to his girlfriend, Emily. The lesbian couple Alice and Boo would prefer to be in Italy than at a dinner party. There is Griever, Libby's supportive friend and would-be lover, whom she frantically calls when things seem to be getting out of hand. Then there is taciturn Norbert, who loves throwing people out of airplanes. In the midst of her preparations, Libby breaks the cap off her front tooth. Now she won't be able to contribute so much as a social smile to her own party without prompting questions for which she has no convivial answers.

The other guests, too, seem to have difficulty communicating. Yet these are all attractive, successful people: composers, secretaries, skydiving instructors, family therapists, and writers. What is it, then, lurking at the dark edges of urban life? What estranges these charming people from themselves and each other and stops them from "relating to the words"?

Blue Window Drama Theater Thursday-Monday, Nov. 14-18 See calendar for time and ticket details.

The play seeks to explore these questions. Says Martha Banta, director and former artistic associate of New York Theater Workshop: "Being in New York City, one wants to connect with other people in several ways and cannot. The city has the most number of people per square footage and yet they cannot connect, even though they try. The party scene in the play is a microcosm of that." Indeed in the party scene, the meat of the play, the people seem to be talking at rather than to each other. This theme reverberates throughout the play, which presents a collage that manages to combine an Italian opera aria and a piano solo by jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, a passage from Virginia Woolf and game shows, Hermann Hesse and family therapy, skydiving and Eugene O'Neill, Buster Keaton and Descartes—all mixed in a bowl of punch. Yet the play also takes place in the spaces between words, capturing evanescent yearnings that can't be articulated, thus conveying intangible moods beneath the dialogue.

The elusive quality of Blue Window is reflected in its title. "The idea of a blue window means different, specific things to each character: a state of being, a destination, a wish; each person has a desire to reach something, to be released—all of that is their blue window," explains Banta.

"The challenge for the actors is layering in the nuances, since this play lacks traditional momentum.

"The technical acting challenges, of course, are different—two scenes of the play occur in five different locations at the same time; the actors have to act in their own worlds for these scenes and not interact with some people who might appear to be talking to them. Two separate conversations that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, sometimes overlap and connect; these characters are hoping for a connection and it just happens without them being aware of it."

(Ironically or perhaps self-reflectively, Lucas makes his character Libby say to Alice the novelist, "I love the way you weave all the different strands together, all the different people in different places doing different things, it's like modern music.")

"The other challenge," continues Banta, "is that the play is set in the 1980s and yet this is not an '80s play. Except for the reference to the time, the play—with appropriate updates like clothing and the prices for skydiving—could happen today."

Once an Off-Broadway hit, Blue Window is actually a frequently produced and revived part of Lucas's body of work. It is breezily written and often divinely funny, and his characters seem real enough to touch; it is also among his most lyrical works. It is typical of his use of fantasy and seemingly banal conversation to make pointed comments about life and relationships. It is an example of the playwright's flair for infusing seemingly mundane events with poignancy and feeling. At the end of the play, once the party has collapsed and most people have gone to their respective homes, the stage dialogue once again becomes fractured. Yet everything the characters say intertwines until, like the music, the words become rhapsodic, leaving the window open for the audience to gaze through.