Aaah, dammit, Teddy (Ari Eckley) has neurosyphilis! But who gave it to her? Was it Jeff (Reid Clarke), an old lover now ensconced in Canada, in marital bliss? Was it the other Jeff (Walter C.A. Riddle), a brutish, aggressive man who sought to take advantage of Teddy’s people-pleasing nature — and did? Was it the indifferent Morgan (Aron Spellane), or Armand (Clarke), whose interest in Teddy stops at the moment of orgasm, after which he can focus his attention on an item on E-Bay upon which he is bidding?
In playwright Caitlin M. Caplinger’s story, the search for the infector soon takes second place to an examination of Teddy’s miserable love life. Her male lovers are hyper-critical, arrogant, uncaring, and generally useless. Her female lovers appear to be of a better lot, but none of those relationships provide lasting satisfaction, either.
It is clear that Teddy is suffering from an illness at least as profound as neurosyphilis: loneliness. She approaches each relationship with her heart on her sleeve, notwithstanding how badly she was used by previous lovers. Her lovers accept only those pieces of her which meet their needs and desires and reject the rest of her; eventually rejecting all of her.
But where do we go from there? Nowhere, since the play rejects linearity, narrative structure, and the Aristotelian Unities as a matter of principal, and the dreadful acoustics of the Blind Whino playing space swallows up much of the play’s remaining coherence.
I cannot emphasize this latter point strongly enough. The Blind Whino turquoise space is a great big rectangle, with the walls painted in a design out of H.P. Lovecraft. I do not know how the space was originally intended, but it is singularly unsuited for the theater. I could understand, perhaps, every second word, and I was sitting in the first row. It was enough to get a sense of the story, but not the story itself. And I can’t really blame the actors. I saw another show in the same venue and had the same problems.
The actors, of course, are allowed only a brief time to rehearse in the venue before the lights go up and the audience comes in. And Caplinger, who also directs this piece, doesn’t help matters by staging overlapping dialogue and having the (rather cool) music (by Natasha Janfaza) override the dialogue on occasion.
“No setup, no stasis, no ordinary world,” dramaturg Sarah Pultz explains in her program notes. “Just a fractured portrayal of a journey with no real beginning and no real end. This is Teddy’s journey. For the brief period of time that you’ve been watching this play, you’ve gotten a glimpse of their mind. Instead of a linear timeline, we see memories, patterns, and cycles all woven into each other. Because, honestly, who thinks linearly? How many of you go through your day, fully present at each and every moment? I’d argue, very few of you.”
Point well taken, but on the other hand, who has a life that anyone would pay to see on stage? Even the bio-plays fudge with the details (see Hamilton). We go to the theater to see something better, more coherent, and more dramatically satisfying than our lives. This isn’t it.
It almost is. In a scene late in the play, Teddy is with her lover Oscar (Riddle). Oscar admires her unshaven legs (a previous lover had derided them as “gross”), and admits that he had once painted his nails, which made him feel sexy. Teddy responds by painting his lips with her lipstick. She tells us that she is about to have fabulous sex. And you get a sense that this relentlessly modern story has an old-school principle at its heart: when you find someone who loves you as yourself in all your glory and strangeness, and puts aside all the irrelevant and nonsensical sexual categories and expectations, you should ride that love as hard and long as you can.
But it doesn’t end there, of course. It ends with another scene, with Teddy shouting at another ex-lover as he leaves port in a boat; him shouting limited apologies back at her.
Life may be random, but we expect more from theater.
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Riot Brrrain by Caitlin M. Caplinger, directed by Caplinger, assisted by Sarah Pultz, who also served as dramaturg . Featuring Ari Eckley, Reid Clark, Tina Canady, Aron Spellman, Walter C. A. Riddle, and Julieta Gozalo . Lighting design by Ian Claar . Sound design by Alex Lubek . Original music by Natasha Janfaza . Clarke Newton is the stage manager . Reviewed by Tim Treanor.
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