Sexual harassment drama proves powerful, funny and richly complex

Just as the #MeToo movement launched a wave of women coming forward about their experiences with sexual harassment in the workplace, it’s also launched a wave of plays about the topic and the Bay Area has seen its share of them in the last few years.

“Love,” the new play by Kate Cortesi now premiering at Marin Theatre Company, is a particularly smart, sharp and resonant take on the subject. It’s complicated in a much more interesting way than he said, she said versions of the same events. There’s no question that the guy did what he did or that what he did was wrong. But the play focuses on a former employee and lover of the accused, who feels a genuine connection with him and believes he was a positive influence on her life even as she grapples with how completely she fits the pattern of hiring women he wants to seduce and proceeding to do so.

A group of former employees is talking to the New York Times about their former boss Otis’ pattern of sexual advances and Penelope feels caught in the middle, never doubting that it’s true, but still feeling a great deal of love and loyalty to him.

Penelope is a big personality, cheerful and chatty, and Clea Alsip’s portrayal deftly unveils the many layers beneath that extroverted confidence. The play jumps backward and forward in time, and in past scenes with Otis, she’s flirtatious and excited both at the attention of the older man and a sense of transgression. The more grown-up Penelope is much more introspective, and you can feel as well as see how much each new disclosure disturbs her.

She also has a delightful connection with Bobak Cyrus Bakhtiari as Jamie, her best friend and later husband. Jamie is a sweetheart, kind and understanding to a fault (even Penelope gets frustrated sometimes with his refusal to get angry, and their interaction is playful and often very funny, especially in one turning-point text-message conversation).

Stephanie Osin Cohen’s spare scenic design is starkly effective. The background is black, the top half devoted to a black screen in which white block letters (projections designed by Teddy Hulsker) announce the time and place of each scene. Different locations are indicated simply by a piece of furniture or two.

Penelope (Clea Alsip) feels caught in the middle when a group of former employees talks to the New York Times about their former boss Otis’ pattern of sexual advances in “Love.”New York director Mike Donahue gives the play a tight and riveting staging with a strong mix of New York and local actors, all new to MTC, except company veteran Robert Sicular (most recently seen in “Mother of the Maid”).

Rebecca Schweitzer exudes tension in the present as Vanessa, the haunted and jittery organizer of the legion of victimized ex-employees, and it’s a striking contrast to then see her hilariously boisterous, drunken past self. Mari Vial-Golden is amusingly distracted as Whitney, Penelope’s seeming incorrigible successor, and primly businesslike as Rebecca, Otis’ wife. Sicular brings considerable gravitas to the serious-minded and earnestly conscientious Times reporter, and also pops up as Whitney’s blithely garrulous dad.

There’s a slight air of sleaziness about R. Ward Duffy’s Otis from the start, although to be fair the audience has been warned about him in advance. He’s also charming and gives an impression of genuine interest in Penelope, even a perversely parental kind of concern for her. He nicely subverts expectations in all the moments you would expect him to be defensive or to lash out or play the martyr. As refreshing as his acceptance of his comeuppance is, it doesn’t excuse anything. It just makes it clearer what it is about his personality that draws people in, this magnetic mix of openness and manipulation.

Cortesi’s script is wonderfully sharp, funny and poignant in all the right places. The nonlinear structure fills in the story fascinatingly, not so much unveiling shocking twists as deepening what we already know and making it more complex. There’s a lot of resonant truth-telling as well, but not in a way that comes off as preachy or didactic. It’s just that there are certain things that need to be said, and there comes a time in someone’s life when she just has to say it.