‘Girl in the Yellow Dress’ the right fit for exploration of cultural, social myths

• Reprints

Carrie Coon and Austin Talley star in "The Girl in the Yellow Dress" at Next Theatre.

Updated: January 31, 2012 2:44PM

Chicago stages are now all abuzz with intense plays confirming this country’s compelling need to think and talk about race, and the ways in which sex, money and class invariably enter any discussion of that subject.

But as Craig Higginson reminds us in his play, “The Girl in the Yellow Dress” — a 90-minute work of scorching emotional heat and dizzying linguistic acrobatics, now in stunning U.S. premiere at Evanston’s Next Theatre — race, and all its intersecting complications, are global issues.

Higginson is a South-African writer who serves as literary manager and dramaturg at the Market Theatre (the Johannesburg-based company that was a flash point for the anti-apartheid struggle). And he possesses the sort of dazzling intelligence and worldly sensibility of a Jon Robin Baitz. In “The Girl in the Yellow Dress,” he gives us an emotionally high-wired story of an encounter between two deeply troubled people living in contemporary Paris — each alienated and confused in different ways, and both trying to come to terms with themselves through their contact with each other. As they discover, they are made of mutually combustible materials.

Although the truthfulness of their stories can vary, Celia (Carrie Coon), is a beautiful young Englishwoman from a wealthy family who has dropped out of the Sorbonne and now earns a little extra money giving private English lessons that are heavy on conversation and the most complex matters of grammar.

Pierre (Austin Talley), who is of African heritage, comes from a rural French village, and is struggling to make his way through the Sorbonne, where he is studying art history and philosophy. He saw Celia post a notice about English lessons, and was immediately drawn to her. He arrives at her apartment (beautifully designed by Jacqueline and Richard Penrod) to take lessons, hoping, as he explains it, that by acquiring topnotch English, he will “fit” into society moresuccessfully.

Both Celia and Pierre are far too bright for their own good, and Higginson creates some dazzling fireworks with banter about the tense of sentences and more. The two also are far too alert to (if not in control of) their particular psycho-sexual and social issues. To be sure, there is a hardcore attraction and repulsion at work here, along with prejudice, fear, rage, insecurity and cultural misunderstanding.

Watching these two actors at work — under the explosive direction of Joanie Schultz — is nothing short of riveting, even if their opening scene might have unfolded just a bit more slowly and tentatively.

Coon, slender and cooly seductive in her enigmatically tense and brainy way, is star material. (She will next appear in Steppenwolf’s “The March,” and then head to New York for the Broadway transfer of that company’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” in which she plays Honey.) Talley, who brings warmth, intelligence and unpredictability to his role, is a superb partner, and he arrives with a list of impressive acting credits that also includes ongoing work on a masters degree in psychology.

Together, these actors inject an erotic charge into the past, future and subjunctive tenses that is at once startling and tension-inducing.