When the French writer Marguerite Duras died in 1996, at age 81, she left behind more than 50 novels, plays, and screenplays. It probably helped her productivity that she didn’t mind repeating herself (or that a lot of her books are really short). The North China Lover—now onstage at Lookingglass Theatre Company in an intriguing but tepid adaptation by Heidi Stillman—was the last published version of a story that pops up several times in Duras’s work. It’s there in her first successful novel, The Sea Wall (1950), and there again in The Lover, the 1984 international best seller for which she’s best known today.
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The real-life events that prompted all this spilled ink make up what sounds like a pretty seamy chapter in the author’s childhood in French Indochina, where her parents were schoolteachers until her father died and her mother took up farming, with financially disastrous results. In most versions of the story, an impoverished, pubescent Duras stand-in meets an older Chinese man on the ferry from Sa Dec to Saigon, and the two of them embark on an affair that today we would call statutory rape.
To convey this aspect of the book onstage, Stillman makes the wise choice of inserting a narrator called M, who’s modeled on the mature Duras. Narrators are commonly used as crutches in page-to-stage adaptations, but in this case M adds a degree of depth to what would otherwise be a lesser Lolita.
Unfortunately, what happens on the periphery is more interesting than what’s supposed to be the main attraction: the affair of “the lover” and “the child,” played by Tim Chiou and Rae Gray. Chiou certainly looks the part (which is pretty much all that’s required of him), and Gray has a knack for wry line readings. But their dealings with one another feel remote and unconvincing, mostly because Gray is tasked with playing the sort of virginal yet world-weary teenager who we can buy on the page but who comes across as artificial in three dimensions. The affair presented here hardly seems worth obsessing over for 50 years. Stillman vividly portrays the act of remembering, but the central action is oddly forgettable.
Through 11/10: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM Lookingglass Theatre Company, Water Tower Water Works 821 N. Michigan 312-337-0665lookingglasstheatre.org $28-$70
