Petty mindgames of ‘Yellow Dress’ short on drama

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Austin Talley and Carrie Coon in "The Girl in the Yellow Dress."

Updated: January 31, 2012 6:53PM

The fraught ethics of lying to someone and lying with someone come into play in “The Girl in the Yellow Dress,” a well-performed but underwhelming two-hander wherein grammar and passion become intertwined.

In Craig Higginson’s slight drama, a brittle English teacher living in a chic Paris flat gets a lot more than her standard tuition fees for tutoring a handsome Sorbonne student who, as it turns out, is after a lot more than lessons in dangling participles and future perfect tenses.

As the relationship between Celia (Carrie A. Coon) and Pierre (Austin Talley) develops from rhetoric to romance, two primary problems become apparent with Higginson’s script. The first is that the dialogue is far too clever by half. Virtually everything Celia and Pierre say in their ongoing discussion of subjunctives, subjects and objects has a witty, effortless double meaning. Sentence structure and sex are woven into in the text and the subtext, resulting in a bantering verbal ballet.

The loaded back-and-forth is cute for a while, as double entendres give the staid topic of sentence structure a crackling undercurrent of naughtiness. But by the time the toe-fondling starts, the banter has grown gimmicky. And unrealistic – people talk like this when they’re reading from a carefully thought-out script, not when they’re in the first uncertain blush of a conflicted relationship.

The second, and larger problem is that as the lessons run their course, nothing worth emotionally investing in really transpires. Neither Celia or Pierre rank high on the empathy meter. She’s haughty and secretive, he’s both childish and more than a little creepy. It’s tough to care whether their speech lessons will expand to include extracurricular physical activities.

Part of the trouble is the stasis inherent to the show. Director Joanie Schultz keeps the pacing snappy, but she can’t overcome the fact that this is a play in which two people spend 90 minutes in one room, talking about syntax and t hemselves.

Nor can she overcome some of the weirdness that Higginson has built into the plot. When Celia learns that Pierre has been secretly following her for years prior to inducing her to take him on as a student, she doesn’t throw him out. Instead, the two just keep on talking until the stalker becomes a sex object in what seems more like a fantasy than something that could credibly happen. Much as “The Girl in the Yellow Dress” tries to paint Pierre’s behavior as quirky or charming, it is in fact obsessive and scary.

Higginson structures the piece around the gradual revelation of secrets, but when the Big Reveal finally arrives, it’s an anti-climax. When Celia owns up to the real reason she left a comfortable life with her wealthy family in London, it’s more shrug-inducing than shocking (and not that hard to figure out well before the dialogue spells it out.)

When Pierre turns out to be not quite the person he’s presented, that too is a dramatic let-down. And as the two continue talking after the revelations, “The Girl in the Yellow Dress” becomes a story of petty mind games and persnickety grammar rather than compelling drama.

The show’s saving grace is the appeal of Coon and Talley, both actors of excellence capable of making Celia and Pierre tolerably engaging. Coon does well portraying a young woman with a deep-seated inability to trust her own judgment and a thick outer shell constructed to keep people at arm’s length. As Pierre, Talley captures both the innocence and the anger of a young man ruled in equal parts by yearning and resentment.

As an acting exercise, “The Girl in the Yellow Dress” is wonderful – both players get the chance to emote from sadness to elation and back again. As a narrative, if falls short.