Shaker Bridge Opens Season With a Sharp Take on Feminism
By Alex Hanson
Valley News Staff Writer
Thursday, October 16, 2014
(Published in print: Thursday, October 16, 2014)
Hello fellow Upper Valley 40-somethings. Have I got a date night suggestion for you.
Rapture, Blister, Burn, Gina Gionfriddo’s 2012 play, now in production at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield, is all about the painful reassessment of life at the dawn of middle age, in this case, 42. That’s how old Catherine, a worldly, sexy academic superstar, is when she comes home to a New England college town to care for her mother, who has just had a heart attack. Being back home puts Catherine, played by New York and Shaker Bridge veteran Brandy Zarle, in the orbit of Don (Joe Reynolds), a former lover from her grad school days. That Don is married to Catherine’s friend Gwen (Victoria Adams-Zischke), well, let’s just say that the play’s first words, which come out of Gwen’s mouth to Don and Catherine are “I knew this wouldn’t be weird!” Cue the nervous laughter.
It’s weird because the people at the points of this love triangle are put in close proximity to their unlived lives, the ones they didn’t choose at 25, at a time when all the possibilities of their actual lives feel exhausted. While the play has been billed as a meditation on whether women can have it all, or feel fulfilled by either career or family alone, it’s as much an autopsy of the first half of life. Any illusions these characters nurtured through their 20s and 30s are laid out on the slab for examination. Shaker Bridge’s production in Enfield’s Whitney Hall communicates the fire and desperation of the characters and, for the most part, the comic pop and hiss of Gionfriddo’s writing.
Although Catherine has all the trappings of success — authorship, TV appearances, a New York apartment, travel — her mother’s heart attack has left her shaken and alone. She sees in Don and Gwen a companionship for which her careerism is ill-suited.
Once an ace teacher, Don is now a dean at what he calls “a fourth-rate liberal arts college.” He is also a regular pot-smoker who has turned irretrievably to online porn for his sexual satisfaction. Gwen is a hectoring recovering alcoholic who can see in her sobriety that she gave up on her own dreams too early; she lives mainly through Don and her two sons.
Don has set Catherine up with a summer class to teach, and in the play’s most glaring contrivance, Gwen and Avery, Gwen’s 21-year-old former babysitter are the only students. Class is held at Catherine’s house, which puts the three women in the company of Catherine’s mother, Alice (Janet Eller). Much of the first act is taken up with a multi-generational discussion of feminism and discontents. Catherine is unmoored and Gwen is stifled. Avery (Caitlin Glasgo) is a harsh, salty judge of the older women, while Alice gently shakes her head and marvels at how the times have changed, and how much has stayed the same, regardless.
After Catherine and Gwen bare their unhappiness, and Don lurches his way from one loyalty to another, a different living arrangement occurs to the members of the triangle.
This is some heavy subject matter, but Gionfriddo’s writing, the solid direction of Bill Coons and capable performances from the whole cast keep the play’s jokes snapping along. Zarle plays Catherine as a learned, independent woman who has reached perhaps the most fragile moment of her life so far. As Don, Reynolds slouches from one scene to another, a sad sack who knows who he is, but wishes he was someone better. Gwen is still searching for her own center, a quality Adams-Zischke brings to the fore. Glasgo steals every scene Avery is in, issuing spiky lines of foul-mouthed disbelief at the cluelessness of her elders. Janet Eller is a steadying presence as Alice.
About Avery and Alice: During the feminism class, they are given some of the play’s most incisive lines as they slice into the middle generation from either end. This is one of the play’s most winning points — its dissection of how feminism and its dicontents change from generation to generation.
A viewer could quibble with Gionfriddo’s decision not to provide a more functional masculine character as a counterpoint to Don, but this is not a play about the sexes. (Indeed the play about a man in this predicament was written long ago and it doesn’t end well. It’s called Death of a Salesman.) Gionfriddo wrote Rapture in part as an homage to Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles and Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. She set out to write a play about internet pornography, but her research on the feminist response to porn led her in another direction.
At the heart of Rapture, Blister, Burn, (a title drawn from the lyrics of Courtney Love’s band, Hole) is the notion that feminism has provided women with more freedom, but hasn’t been able to help women, or men, to negotiate it, an idea that Catherine articulates.
This helps explain the play’s spiritual underpinning: addiction. The characters are often found numbing themselves, with booze, pot, porn, sex, as a distraction from an environment that requires constant, almost feverish communication.
Gwen gave up drinking years before and attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but while Don seems possessed of enough self-awareness to know he’s stuck, he pooh-poohs Gwen’s participation. Middle age is when it might be a good idea for all of us to ask some sort of higher power to grant us serenity to accept the things we cannot change and the courage to change the things we can, to paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer.
In the end, earth-shaking change is hard to come by in middle age. And maybe that’s for the best.
Rapture, Blister, Burn is in production at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield through Oct. 26. Tickets are $32, $25 for students with ID. Call 603-448-3750 or email reservations@shakerbridgetheatre.org.
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