The newly refurbished ’92 Theater reopened with style on Oct. 9, but it wasn’t the renovations that took center stage. “Want’s Unwisht Work,” written by Kirk Wood Bromley and directed by Max Goldblatt ’05, went up that night, and the theatre was transformed.
This modern play in verse is actually a play within a play: Richard (Chris Kaminstein ’05) has written a play for, his wife, Elisa’s birthday (Allison Layman ’06), hence the alternate title, “A Birthday Play”. The straight-talking Elisa is less than pleased about sitting through another of her husband’s productions, and quickly nods off in her chair, sleeping through the ensuing show.
The play proper, which follows, is the story of a college house in Athens, Ga. that has been set aside for women’s study. The women moving in have sworn off the company of men, but how long the edict will last is called into question from the start.
Marla (Lily Whitsitt ’06) and Lydia (Zoe Goldberg ’04) quickly set about wooing each other’s boyfriends, while their professor Bertha Lerner (Kate MacCluggage ’04) insists upon admitting Dr. Kling (Seth Samuels ’05), a psychoanalyst of sorts and his student Erad (Nick Gerry-Bullard ’06). Only the heroine Corme (Sara Bremen ’05) stands tall: she sees both the ignorance of their vows and the stupidity of breaking them. But when Dr. Kling begins his manipulative plot against Corme’s individuality—and current vow of chastity—the real battle of the sexes begins.
But this is no tale of “he said, she said.” The play rejects all the Mars/Venus nonsense and equalizes the sexes in portraying their weaknesses, turning the house of grave celibacy into a sexual free-for-all. Lydia and Marla are the aggressors in their plotline, each lusting after the other’s partner. Lydia wants Marla’s crude, hormone-driven boyfriend Leavus (Josh Lubin-Levy ’06), and Marla masturbates loudly to odes performed by Lydia’s tights-wearing, worshipful Warren (Corey Harrower ’06).
Each girl independently tricks the other’s beau into dressing up as a woman in order to enter the house. In a nice flip of stereotypical roles, the unrequited girls chase, bully and manhandle their love-objects into all sorts of gender-bending hijinks, culminating in Leavus’ seduction of the disguised Warren. The interplay of the four lovers is raunchy and beyond hysterical—at one particularly high point, Goldberg scales Lubin-Levy like a pole and relentlessly humps his shoulder.
And then there’s Vazoline. Or Richard, if you’ll recall the ‘playwright.’ He appears in his own play as a pink-sequined drag queen and continually reappears in incredible outfits to make scathing, uproariously wise jokes and cause mischief.
Vazoline is a figure of unity—all genders at once, (s)he emblemizes the folly in the other characters’ notions of a schism between the sexes. Richard, who clearly feels a schism between himself and his wife, envies Vazoline’s ability to span such gaps: when the play is done, he realizes he felt “concurrent” with his playrole.
Vazoline is obviously an important thematic device. And, more importantly, Vazoline is hot. Aside from looking great in a garter belt, Kaminstein is an amazingly gifted actor; as Vazoline, he gives a complex speech about Pan, the god who fuses pleasure with pain—the play’s Queen Mab monologue. With Kaminstein as Vazoline, the monologue is magnetic.
Any real criticisms here are few. There were some minor language problems, especially early on. Goldblatt’s spot-on sound design was overwhelming when the audience was still getting used to the verse, and the long exposition scenes fell a bit flat. Also, the scene when Erad and Corme first fall for each other seemed marked rather than acted. The sexual puns, used so well elsewhere in the play, were glossed over here despite the actors’ chemistry; and when Erad later laments his great love for Corme, we are forced to take his word for it.
There was also a serious imbalance in the otherwise brilliant script: two separate groups of clowns wander in and out while being, at best, tangential to the plot. The Rambling Fanatics (Sascha Stanton-Craven ’04, Max Lesser ’04, Lucas Jansen ’04 and Adam Hetland ’05) are sex-starved losers of various gimmicks who storm through the play in search of tail, speaking in an incomprehensible slang all their own. The Wishful Waiters (Jacob Robinson ’04, Stewart Miller ’05, Abe Lateiner ’04, Jessalee Landfried ’07) are a low-rent troupe of actors hired by Corme’s parents to perform a birthday-gram for their daughter. Goldblatt handled this challenge well, with an excellent, vivid cast and well-constructed humor. Though these scenes sometimes broke up the flow of the play, they produced great performances, particularly from Robinson, Miller and Stanton-Craven.
The large cast was well-oiled and sparked with creativity. MacCluggage displayed her trademark stage presence—she’s a true pro who hasn’t always gotten the roles she is due. Bremen was effortlessly distressed and sharp-witted by turn, a pseudo-ingénue who in the end rescues herself. Samuels did laudable work with his character’s difficult language, which combined faux-German and psychobabble to a sinister effect, and Gerry-Bullard adeptly handled both Erad’s complicit and rebellious sides, toadying to Kling until he realizes the doctor’s destructive power.
Goldblatt brought everything together with a crowning touch. At the end of the play Elisa leaves Richard alone onstage and exits into the house—a flat, monstrous pink structure that is polka-dotted to the verge of pointillism. As she closes the door the entire house wobbles, then begins to careen forward. Kaminstein’s back is to it, but he can no doubt see the audience screaming and waving in panic as it crashes on top of him, its paper walls ripping apart on his skull as the wooden frame lands on the floor around him. The entire cast is arrayed silently behind him where the house once stood, and Richard stands motionless, his face isolated in light, as he delivers his closing monologue in a space now stripped of artifice.
Birth and destruction, pain and pleasure, crotch-grabs and pelvic thrusts held sway at the ’92 that week. For a new space and a new theater community, it couldn’t have been a more auspicious beginning.
WANT’S UNWISHT WORK (OR, A BIRTHDAY PLAY) By Kirk Wood Bromley; directed by Max Goldblatt ’05; stage manager Michelle Paul ’04; assistant director Dan Janvey ’06; art direction by Ray Tintori ’06; set by Corey Harrower ’06; lights by Susan Manikas ’04; costumes and make-up by Alex Verville ’06 and Andrea Neustein ’06; sound by Max Goldblatt ’05; props by Alison Lerner ’04.
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