"Intimate Exchanges": All's well that ends ... one way or another

Endings are a tricky business for many playwrights. But trust leading English dramatist Alan Ayckbourn to tackle the problem of a satisfying denouement in an ingenious manner.

His two-act comedy "Intimate Exchanges" ultimately allows for 16 possible endings — dependent upon choices the characters make throughout the play. Those choices are as seemingly insignificant as whether to smoke a cigarette or not.

In ACT Theatre's local premiere of the work (which had an acclaimed mounting Off Broadway last year), only four of those possible endings are being presented, on alternate evenings.

And all six characters in the entire shebang are played by just two quick-changing Seattle actors: Marianne Owen and R. Hamilton Wright.

Fortunately, Owen and Wright are practiced farceurs and veterans of navigating the sort of parallel universe Ayckbourn charts out.

ACT Theatre artistic head Kurt Beattie, the director of the show, is counting on the cast's savvy — and rewarding it.

"This is a great piece for actors," he pronounces, "and it's hilariously funny. And choosing different options on different nights is a great excuse to get people to come back to see it again!"

Beattie also finds serious substance in "Intimate Exchanges," which in all versions concerns the intertwined marriages and romances of two middle-age couples in British suburbia.

"The play contains great descriptions of certain social problems that have not yet been solved," Beattie suggests. "Here's a work, from 1982, that explains a lost middle class to itself in a particularly smart and profound way."

The prolific Ayckbourn, 69, with some 70 plays to his credit, has for years served as a kind of very long-distance, unofficial playwright-in-residence at ACT.

ACT has staged nine productions of his plays since the 1980s — works Ayckbourn debuted in his native England at a playhouse where he is co-artistic director (the Stephen Joseph Theatre, in Scarborough).

The most recent was ACT's 2003 mounting of the mirthful romp "Absurd Person Singular," directed by former ACT artistic head Jeff Steitzer. (Owen and Wright were part of the cast.)

Many of the scripts devised by this comic master are structural puzzles, designed to keep audiences guessing and actors on their toes.

Not all are equally engaging, but as Beattie suggests, "Intimate Exchanges" may be in a league of its own in terms of degree of difficulty. "It's easy to follow for the audience, but it's not easy to read the script! With all those variables, it's the size of the Bible."

The possible permutations of the story are represented on a mandala-like flow chart tracking how the fixed opening scene can generate up to eight different plays, depending on an array of options. Further choices can branch off into 16 different outcomes.

Accommodating every structural tangent requires a longer run than ACT can deliver. But Beattie says even choosing between four different endings in the voluminous text will illustrate "chaos theory" — a scientific contention that one small action can have huge consequences in individual lives, or even the entire ecosphere.

In a 2007 interview, Ayckbourn commented that the play is "really about a woman making the tiniest choice, but out of that comes these endings ... people die, get married or have children, and all as a result of this tiny ripple effect."

We've all seen seemingly routine decisions loom large in our own lives. Beattie notes that if he hadn't agreed in the 1980s to act in a St. Louis production of the Clifford Odets play "Golden Boy" (directed by future "Angels in America" author Tony Kushner), his own life might be very different today. It was in that show he met Marianne Owen, who is his wife.

"I was playing a homosexual gangster. She was playing a whore. And I had to threaten her with a knife," Beattie recalls with a chuckle. "What can I say? It was love at first sight."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com