BEDROOM SET, Great Beast Theater, at Live Bait Theater. All four one-acts that make up “Bedroom Set” involve a man, a woman, and a big brass bed. But in none of them does anyone sleep (though the wife of the boisterous early riser in Lanford Wilson’s Breakfast at the Track makes a valiant effort) or have sex (unless you count the cheerful suburban housewife whose husband just caught her with their next-door neighbor in Elliot Hayes’s Poison). To the playwrights represented in this anthology, a bed is a marital battlefield–or at least a negotiating table. In Tennessee Williams’s Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, a self-pitying loser grudgingly allows his mate equal whining time and gets more of an earful than he’d expected. And in Anastasia Royal’s Bed a couple on the morning after discourse in the kind of manifestos we associate with therapy sessions.
