Steppenwolf's 'Time' more domestic than daring

“Time Stands Still” resonates within Steppenwolf Theatre's declared theme for its current season, dedicated to “Dispatches From the Homefront.” On its own, however, Donald Margulies' play is something less than explosive. It deals in undeniably incendiary material, in the form of a wounded war-zone photographer and her colleague partner (in all manners of speaking), both returned damaged from Iraq to their Brooklyn apartment, but the ethical issues it draws on are inert.

Not to say the play is a dud. It creates a nice little space for four characters to act out the dynamic between thrill-seeking professionalism and more mundane domesticity, and as always the Steppenwolf production is never less than a solid piece of work. It just never really bursts into a fully involving drama.

Sally Murphy returns from last season's “Sex With Strangers” to play Sarah, a photographer injured in a roadside bombing. Semifamous both for that incident and her body of work, she says, “I had my 15 minutes (of fame) and spent it unconscious,” in a German army hospital. With an injured arm, leg and shrapnel wounds, she nevertheless fights being tended to, and in her fiery moods appears to be dealing with post-traumatic stress.

Randall Newsome is James, her live-in lover and colleague of eight and a half years, the writer who puts the words to her images. He announces their plan is, “We put you back together again,” but he's not exactly whole himself, having suffered a breakdown and bailed on her in Iraq prior to the incident.

Enter Francis Guinan as Richard, their Manhattan magazine editor. While the first two are the leads, it's a key role, and Guinan plays it perfectly, with a self-satisfied air of the theatrical befitting a glossy magazine editor. He's also Sarah's former lover from 20 years ago and maintains a doting aspect over her, which he also shares with Kristina Valada-Viars' Mandy, his latest inamorata, who tags along in a flurry of public displays of affection.

That, however, is where things get a little pat. Compared with those three, Mandy, of course, is an insubstantial handy dandy, an events planner not in the same league.

“I guess you could say I'm into events too,” Sarah counters. “Wars, famines, genocides.”

That's fine, as far as it goes, but when Mandy suddenly mouths the tired old ethical argument about photojournalism — if these people are suffering so, why don't you actually help them in the moment instead of shooting their pictures? — it seems forced.

The family dynamic that develops isn't much more convincing. Mandy, it turns out, is pregnant, and Richard is committed to forming a family with her — even at his late stage in life. Under their influence, and shying from a return to more “serious” work, James (literally) proposes the same for Sarah, saying, “We don't have to do this anymore. We can stay home. We can make a home.”

Both Murphy and Newsome are fine in their roles, but at the same time they hardly seem “the Sid and Nancy of journalism,” as Richard describes them, mainly because that pursuit of self-destructive thrills isn't really there in Margulies' script. Sarah makes reference to a turbulent family background, saying, “War was my parents' house all over again, only on a different scale,” and there's a past romantic entanglement involving her Iraqi “fixer” and guide, Tariq, but that again seems more the stuff of a Manhattan melodrama than a full-fledged conflict. There's no hard edge to their characters, no genuine pride in the work — ethical conflicts be damned. That might make their flirtation with the domestic seem more plausible, but it also undercuts their characters' more steely aspects.

Otherwise, the production is sharp, especially Austin Pendleton's direction. He creates space between the characters — as when James sends Sarah emails from across the apartment — then draws them together at apt times, and he also pulls off a neat trick when the most dramatic single moment in the play takes place with an empty stage. The ending, too, is astute, playing on the title and Sarah's remark: “When I look through that little rectangle, time stops.” As it turns out, however, Margulies' play tends more toward the domestic than the daring, and that stops it from attaining any true greatness.