Ed Harris in Must-See “WRECKS” at Geffen Theatre (02/10)

Steel on a wire, actor Ed Harris with his unnerving ice blue eyes and chilled voice is powerful and magnetic on the screen.  So imagine him talking to you in person. Well, don’t imagine, just go to see him in writer-director Neil LaBute’s revised Wrecks at the Geffen Theatre.  Attending the colloquy after a performance in the intimate theatre and he confirms to your face that he was “looking to you and others in the audience for a reaction.”  

To say this intense experience is captivating is an understatement, and at times it subdues the humor of the show, as Harris laments.  In it, brand new widower, Ed, coffin in view, tells the story in  an 80-minute monologue about his wonderful but complicated marriage, which he labels “a love story.”  And that it is, indeed, a love story with a twist at the end that leaves the audience gasping and that afterward demands examination for the clues leading up to it. 

Harris is mind-boggling, from the moment he comes out, cigarette in hand, and comments naturally, as he checks in with the audience, “it’s just so hard to quit.”  So it was astonishing when Harris comments about LaBute’s writing, “easy to hear but hard to say.”  A former star athlete, Harris is marvelous when he prances around, mimicking a housewife carrying in a casserole or falling- splat- on his back regaling us with a story about a fight.

The play is a reminder that Harris, ever the intelligent individualistic whether playing, John Glenn in The Right Stuff or the painter, Pollock, or the zany cowboy in Fools for Love, has such depth and wonderful sense of humor and masculinity that he illuminates the stage or screen in a sensual and appealing way  It is why even his smaller movies are memorable, whether Milk Money or Empire Falls.

LaBute describes the slyly devoted husband of Wreck best when he praises Harris’s “coiled performance” as a man with “a fury in him.”

 For more information and tickets, visit www.geffenplayhouse.com.