Michael Dale’s Theatre Crawl – Two Plays About Attempting To Control Women; One Political, One Personal
Fig Chilcott and Frank Zwally in Modern Swimwear (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)
by Michael Dale
This week…
The Appointment at WP Theater through February 4. Tickets $49.
Modern Swimwear at The Tank through February 12. Tickets $25/$35/$50.
Inexpensive and recommended…
The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes at The Tank through February 9. Tickets $25.
Song Of Joy at The Tank through January 29. Tickets $25/$35/$50.
The Fire This Time Festival at the Kraine Theater through January 29. Tickets are pay what you can. With a name taken from a rhyming couplet from the African-American spiritual "Mary, Don't You Weep" ("God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time"), this annual festival provides a platform for early-career playwrights from the African diaspora. I had a great time last year at one of their programs of ten-minute plays.
It isn’t every week when I see plays that have a strong thematic connection to one another…
On the surface, the newest offerings at WP Theater and The Tank aren’t very similar, but they’re linked by the theme of attempts to control women; one through personal behavior and the other through political acts.
The most horrific, and brilliant, use of a sound cue I’ve witnessed in quite some time…
…occurs at the climactic moment of Caitlin Saylor Stephens’ Modern Swimwear. If you know a certain detail about one of the fact-based characters, it’s a real jaw-dropper. If you know something about another real-life person strongly connected to the sound cue, or even if you just recognize what it is, it’s still quite a stunner and a daring playwrighting choice in what is eighty minutes of tense and gripping drama.
If you’re not already familiar with headline-making story, I’ll leave it to you if you want to do a little Googling in advance of seeing the play to learn about what happened involving rising star swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay in the early morning hours of December 9th, 2010 at the Manhattan branch of Soho House. While the play doesn’t identify characters with last names, press materials make it clear that the author’s fiction is suggested from what is known of Cachay’s experience that night and events leading up to it.
The entire piece is played in designers Christopher and Justin Swader’s excellent recreation of a Meatpacking District boutique hotel room, featuring clear walls that allow the audience to see inside the bathroom. After an accident has driven her from her apartment, the 33-year-old Sylvie (Fig Chilcott) is spending the night there with her boyfriend of six months, 24-year-old Nick (Frank Zwally), a habitual stoner who has moved in with her.
Sylvie has an important, potential career-boosting presentation to give in the morning and needs to get some sleep, but Nick is keeping her up by stressing out over a psychological issue that’s causing him to feel an intense shock whenever she touches him. (Sarah Johnston’s lighting and Marcelo Añez’s sound help give the audience a sense of what he’s feeling.) He finds this especially distressing since, having shown no interest in his girlfriend’s career, his horniness seems to be the focal part of his life.
“I’m too old for a fucking relationship,” the tired and frustrated Sylvie complains.
“Well, I’m too young to not have one,” he snaps back.
I’ll leave it to the playwright to reveal the specifics this setup leads to, but the upshot is that the mature, career-minded Sylvie bends over backwards to address the needs of the unmotivated, attention-craving Nick, whose expertise is in using vulnerability as manipulation. And while I’m not going to claim to fully understand why women like her hang onto guys like him, conversations with women friends have suggested certain complexities involved; complexities that lend subtext to the excellent performances by Chilcott and Zwally. (There’s also fine work by Chad Pierre Vann in a small, mostly functional role.)
While the play includes moments of violence and sexual situations (simulated, clothed masturbation), the work of director Meghan Finn, intimacy director Max Mooney and fight director David Anzuelo never seems exploitative. Modern Swimwear is realistic, disturbing and not to be missed.
“Some of the information the state requires me to give you today I find to be a little misleading and in some cases it is actually false, but in order for me to continue providing this service in this state, I am required by law to share with you all of the following information, okay?”
There are two levels of surrealism that permeate The Appointment, the abortion-themed creation of the theatre troupe Lightning Rod Special that last played in New York when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land.
One is the nightmare absurdity of what actually exists, played out in a series of straightforward, deadpan scenes depicting a woman’s visits to a health center leading up to, and including, her abortion. The central role is played with calm acceptance by lead artist Alice Yorke, who co-authored the show with Eva Steinmetz (who directs), Scott R. Sheppard and composer/lyricist Alex Bechtel.
The above speech is spoken by a doctor (Sheppard) after the woman receives an ultrasound, during which her state requires her to look at the screen and describe, in her own words, the image she sees. Later, she sits with a few other women, waiting to pay for the cash-only $500 procedure. Some have received funding and one-by-one we learn the varying amounts each is required to pay.
These scenes alternate with the dreamlike absurdity of a vaudeville show, featuring an ensemble of adorable, funny, singing and dancing fetuses, with actors wearing designer Rebecca Hanach’s full body costumes that include umbilical cords that double as microphones.
Katie Gould (center) and company of The Appointment (Photo: Michael Kushner Photography)
“We’ll make you feel so whole. / We’re what you dreamed of. / Tiny, but filled with soul,” they sing, anticipating the happy family life ahead of them until a large symbolic vaudeville hook one-by-one pulls them off their womblike stage.
After a scene where the women are told they must wait 24-hours before having their procedures, three fetuses (Yorke, Brett Ashley Robinson and Lee Minora) huddle together to try and figure who can rescue them. “Daddy!,” they conclude, and engage men in the audience in a bonding interaction that includes giving one of the fetuses a first, middle and last name. (“And my last name is the name of a woman you’ve treated poorly.”)
Though a portion of ticket proceeds is donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds’ Collective Power Fund, The Appointment, in its comedic way, does present humanized versions of fetuses, with personalities and feelings. At least two of the songs, if not presented so broadly, could qualify as anti-abortion anthems: a pastor’s (Katie Gould) condemnation of the practice refers to “murderers dressed up like nurses” and a character called Scary Fetus (Jamie Maseda), stumbles onto the stage, seeming barely capable of survival, before singing, “I never learned to walk, I never learned to run… But I learned how to love.”
Perhaps the cartoonish presentation of the pro-fetus rights vaudeville is The Appointment’s argument against abortion restrictions, especially compared with the simple, quiet dignity of the last scene, where we witness the woman’s final visit. As described in the press script, those moments are meant to represent “a womb world, where antagonistic, anthropomorphized fetuses engage the audience in confronting the ways they implicitly participate in a misogynistic culture and thereby contribute to systems that keep reproductive health care out of reach for so many.”
Curtain Line…
Watching Everett Quinton perform on stage was like watching a living museum of an art form. Rest in ridiculousness.