Friday, November 15, 2002 'Sleeping Around' sexy on its surface Issues of connection and truth lie deeper in the U.S. premiere, offered by Santa Ana's Rude Guerrilla. By ERIC MARCHESE Special to the Register One day, a young lady went to bed with an older gent whom she'd met at a party. Bored with him, she slept with a dashing young man a few hours later. But he was in love with a married woman, and he romanced her that night. She then slept with her husband, who had a fling with his mistress, and so the circle continued. While today such a game of musical beds may not sound too earth-shaking, in the late 19th century, even the mention of it was regarded as indecent. That's when Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler wrote the play "Reigen (The Round)," in which one character from each two-person scene would sleep with a different character in the next. Though "Reigen" essentially condemned the sexual promiscuity of its characters, just the fact that anyone would dare broach the subject in so public a forum as theater made the play a shocker. Schnitzler's preoccupations with the issues of honor, marriage, love and sexuality have inspired numerous plays and films (a 1926 Schnitzler novel sparked Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut"). Filmed by Ophuls in 1950 as "La Ronde," "Reigen" has provided rich source material - most recently in 1998, with the London openings of "Sleeping Around," written by Mark Ravenhill, Hilary Fannin, Stephen Greenhorn and Abi Morgan; and David Hare's "The Blue Room." "Sleeping Around" gets its U.S. premiere tonight at the Empire Theater in Santa Ana's Artists Village. With so new a treatment of so tantalizing a subject, why has it taken so long for it to cross the Atlantic? "The play was overshadowed by 'The Blue Room,'" according to Dave Barton, who directs "Sleeping Around" for the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company. "Both came out at about the same time, but Hare's play had a naked Nicole Kidman attached to it, so 'Sleeping Around' was unfairly ignored." Barton became hooked on the works of British playwright Ravenhill when he read and produced Ravenhill's "Shopping and F----" in 2000. He said he has read Schnitzler's original, "The Blue Room" and "Sleeping Around," and the latter is the "best of the three." "Hare uses the same characters as Schnitzler and politicizes them," Barton said, noting Hare's typical method of attacking Britain's class system. On the other hand, "Sleeping Around" uses "Reigen" as a jumping-off point for an exploration into the deep- seated human drive to connect with others. Ravenhill and his three cohorts wanted to see if their four voices could create a uniform vision, so they wrote "Sleeping Around" for the Paines Plough Theatre Company. Set in 1999, six months before the coming of the new millennium, it poses the question, "Are we going to connect?" Each sex scene occurs in a separate location, from a park to a corporate balcony to a hotel room to a warehouse, providing a challenge at the 55-seat Empire. Barton said one motif is that of characters talking at, rather than with, one another - in essence, failing to connect. "Sleeping Around" also features many a backhanded slap at corporate marketing (in this case, Coca-Cola), an ongoing theme of Ravenhill's. Barton emphasized, though, the way the play gets its concepts across: "It has a sense of humor. It's funny, warm, sad, angry and touching." Around 1997, during Rude Guerrilla's inception, Barton eyed "Reigen" with a mind toward adapting it. Then he discovered Ravenhill's work. "His plays are profoundly honest," Barton noted. "He addresses audiences with respect, intelligence and a sense of humor." Fannin, Greenhorn and Morgan "work in the same vein of truth-telling (as Ravenhill)-- and truth-telling is a way to connect with others."