It's actually sex times 10 in this adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's 100-year-old erotic masterpiece, an ironic commentary on the gulf between dreams and reality. 

Hare sticks to Schnitzler's device of the "daisy chain," according to director Elizabeth A. Harris, in which two actors play five different characters each in 10 different scenes. At each scene change, one character is left behind to meet with someone new for his or her next sexual encounter.

The first scene, for instance, is between a prostitute, played by Elizabeth Taylor, and a cab driver, played by Mike Hall. In the second scene, Taylor plays the cab driver's next date, and so on until the final scene, when the Aristocrat has a liaison with the prostitute of the first scene, bringing the play full circle.

"We move up the social class scale with each scene," Harris said. "It all takes place in the course of a year in present-day London."

Schnitzler's original, written in 1903 but not produced until 1920 in Vienna where it met with great controversy for its sexual content.

"The theater was closed down and the actors arrested on obscenity charges," Harris said, but said that Hare's adaptation doesn't shy away from the content. "If anything, he's beefed it up a little."

While changing the setting from Vienna to present-day London, Hare adheres to Schnitzler’s theme that sexual conquest by itself is more likely to empty the soul than fulfill it, showing how sundry couplings inevitably lead to remorse, regret, or a brutal indifference to the object of passion.

"It's about how most people don't really like who they are and are constantly trying to change," Harris said. "But using sexual intimacy to fill a hole in your life often leaves you even emptier than when you start."