For Reasons That Remain Unclear
Kings Head Theatre
★★★

A CHANCE encounter between two North Americans on the streets of Rome ends in confrontation and confession in Matt Crowley’s For Reasons That Remain Unclear, which gets its European premiere at the King’s Head, headlining their Queer Season.

Conrad and Patrick seem to be strangers whose chance encounter has turned into an afternoon and evening of drinking, eating, flirting and teasing, but, as their time together unfolds, it becomes clear that, in fact, they share a deeply traumatic historical connection.

Crowley is best known for 1984’s The Boys in the Band and he pulls no punches in the portrayal of religion and child abuse in his equally challenging follow-up play.

For Reasons That Remain Unclear premiered in 1993 at the Olney Theatre in Olney, Maryland. While the play’s content is still shocking, we’re in a world more aware of these abuses of power today and so it’s not hard to intuit where the script is going.

On the one hand, there’s a hypnotic quality to watching the tragedy unfold, but at times the tension falls flat and Jessica Lazar’s production sags a little.

Simon Haines plays Patrick with a wry smile and a brooding intensity. The moment he confronts Conrad (Cory Peterson) is a deeply shocking one in which Haines walks a lovely line between anger, menace and pain.

Although Haines and Peterson both offer up engaging performances, we rather feel the lack of a spark between the two of them.

The King’s Heads Queer Season has run annually since 2015 and this year will also stage Tennessee Williams’s And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, which was never staged in the playwright’s lifetime, and Rikki Beadle-Blair will direct Riot Act, a verbatim piece about AIDS activism.

Until August 25 2018. Box office: kingsheadtheatre.com.