The artists, writers and philosophers of the Bloomsbury group were a randy lot, especially for Victorian England. It’s a side of them the play “Eternal Equinox” is bent on capturing, depicting as it does the romantic triangle between painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and George Mallory, the man who famously said he climbed a mountain “because it’s there.”
Set at Charleston, the country home shared by the unmarried lovers Bell and Grant — and a meeting place for Bell’s sister, Virginia Woolf, and E.M. Forster, among others — the play takes place in 1923, the year before Mallory (Christian Pedersen) makes the climb up Mount Everest that cost him his life.
Mallory has come to invite Grant (Michael Gabriel Goodfriend) to serve as the climb’s official artist and photographer. A horrified Bell is quick to point out that the painter is “an entirely domesticated animal.”
The sexual tensions among the three quickly emerge: Grant, a bisexual, is smitten with the strapping explorer, and so is Bell (Hollis McCarthy), with whom Mallory once had a fling. Hanging in the air is Mallory’s suspicion that he is the father of Bell’s young daughter, Angelica.
Playing like an episode of “Masterpiece Theater” designed for late-night Cinemax, Joyce Hokin Sachs’ high-toned, steamy drama reveals less of its real-life characters than it does the ripped bodies of the actors playing them. The principals are in frequent stages of undress, particularly when both men strip naked before going for a late-night dip. In the tiny confines of this black-box theater, it makes for an up-close-and-personal experience.
Although the dialogue has flashes of wit — “Have you two found a common enterprise?” asks Bell upon spotting the men in a passionate clinch — “Eternal Equinox,” named for the day of the year when it takes place, doesn’t live up to the potentially fascinating subject matter.
Under Kevin Cochran’s direction, the performers believably inhabit their period roles, and Leonard Ogden’s wonderfully detailed set includes re-creations not only of the artists’ paintings, but a framed photo of Woolf.
But for all the careful research that has gone into its writing and staging, the play captures the lust without ever coming to compelling life.