Rapture, Blister, Burn is rom-com feminism fun
N.B. BLR gives readers a Quicky version that features three sections : From the footlights, Acting pin-spots & Who gonna like. Enthusiasts with time who want more back-story & dialogue quotations & production details as well as ticket specifics can read the entire review in the Wordy version that follows.
Quicky Version
From the footlights : Notionally RBB is the story of a fast-track professor, writer and t.v. pundit whose career focus for 15 years has been how feminism has played out since the days of Betty Frieden. At its core the show is a check-in how first-world women continue to butt up against more complexity in their efforts to fulfill themselves than men seem to face. The very subject was approached by my mid-40's daughter this week in forwarding an article from CNN she'd recently run into "Why is 'having it all' just a woman's issue?" Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose is, apparently, the short answer. Playwright Gina Gionfriddo offers up some kale and collard greens along with the pizza-&-beer that are regular fare throughout her piece : happiness, she says, always has two components, the "what"and the "how". RBB reminds us there are fat & carbos galore along with nutrition in each slice of life's pie that's up for grabs.
Acting pin-spots : What Director Aaron Craven achieves best in the piece is not only his casting but his dialogue timing, emphasis, and emotional draw. From the get-go his conception of the script was spot-on : "In our fair city of Vancouver, the cost of living dictates a two income household. Local families with advanced educations struggle to fit career fulfillment, child rearing, romance, bill paying and 'me time' into a 24 hour day. Empowered young singles populate the new condos and bars while the dating scene...continues to be viewed through the matrix of 'stuck up' women and 'weird metrosexual' men...As our social paradigms shift faster than ever, our age-old quest for happiness remains."
To single out any of the five superb actors might be a tad unfair, so let's hi-lite them all. Moya O'Connell as Catherine absolutely aced her role from minute one to minute 120. Lori Triolo's emotional explosion at the start of Act 2 was sublime : "If you reject the sphere of family and home you may not like it. If you give up being a homemaker, you better be sure it was all worth it!" she yells at Catherine who is now clearly an adulterer right in Gwen's back yard. Courtney Shields as the youthy provocateur in the piece was a hoot, while impish Mom Anna Hagan was just plain fun. C- slacker & wanker & toker Robert Moloney was the character every red-blooded male I know fears he could become if he weren't vigilant. When men stop working at turning toward their mates rather than toward their computer screens, beware! the result, gentlemen. A clever well-finessed performance.
Who gonna like : In a week when as a reviewer I've lived through the emotion of dementia demise by Rubyslippers at the Cultch, and now self-actualization confrontations by Mitch and Murray Productions at Studio 16, I confess to a wee bit of emotional whack-out. At the end, Rapture, Blister, Burn is more rom-com than serious gritty grab-you-by-the-throat drama that a David Mamet script almost always is. Still, this is small-stage excellence of a recurring intimate theme in our society : as Even Cowgirls Get The Blues novelist Tom Robbins famously said, "Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that, and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon." You can't miss getting a hint of what the purpose of this week's full moon is if you go see this stunning production.
Wordy Version
From the footlights : Notionally RBB is the story of a fast-track professor, writer and t.v. pundit whose career focus for 15 years has been how feminism has played out since the days of Betty Frieden. At its core the show is a check-in how first-world women continue to butt up against more complexity in their efforts to fulfill themselves than men seem to face. The very subject was approached by my mid-40's daughter this week in forwarding an article from CNN she'd recently run into "Why is 'having it all' just a woman's issue?" Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose is, apparently, the short answer. Playwright Gina Gionfriddo offers up some kale and collard greens along with the pizza-&-beer that are regular fare throughout her piece : happiness, she says, always has two components, the "what"and the "how". RBB reminds us there are fat & carbos galore along with nutrition in each slice of life's pie that's up for grabs.
How it's all put together : Sometimes for discussion to work writers need to resort to extremes or stereotypes to make their points. Much as the not-so-lamented but late Sex And The City scripts featured in the late 90's. In RBB the new stereotype is media sizzler Catherine (Moya O'Connell) -- apparently liberated, envied -- she shattered the glass ceiling. Catherine holds forth on CNN and is championed "the hot doomsday chick" by Bill Maher. She likes to draw deadly linkages between pop culture and porn's allure on the internet. But Catherine worries that once Mom dies she will face a future devoid of love : she has never married, no kids, serial hook-ups nothing more. Oh crap. Just a cliff and an abyss ahead of me?
Catherine's mom Alice (Anna Hagan) has just had a heart attack. Catherine returns to her hometown to nurse mom (who's wry and wise and lovingly waspish). Same town where her ex-college roomie Gwen (Lori Triolo) lives. With her hubby Don (Robert Moloney). Coincidence alert : Don and Catherine were paramours at grad school. Don and Catherine and Gwen hung out at taverns and slugged back copious bottles of Bud. Then Catherine hied off to London town "for a year" to pursue academia. Don, miffed and hurt, snags Catherine's ex-BFF Gwen in matrimony. Gwen is now a 10-year AA member with two kids a decade apart. She is equally and oppositely unhappy, she thinks, as Catherine. Never graduated, never a career, a stay-at-home mom 100%.
Formerly a grad school uebermensch, Don now prefers to laze away his days with pot and late-nite porn titillation. He's been shuffled off the academic porch and made into a dean who counsels troubled students. He helps Catherine mount a Fall course on feminism at his "4th-rate college". Coincidence alert #2 : A trial seminar is set up for the summer semester : only Gwen and her ex-babysitter Avery (Courtney Shields), enrol.
Avery's a pre-med drop-out who's now a reality t.v. maker with some lout named Lucas. The class is held in Alice's living room. Alice pops in at 5 p.m. each day with a tray of martinis and lots of Phyllis Schlafly opinions.
Avery's a pre-med drop-out who's now a reality t.v. maker with some lout named Lucas. The class is held in Alice's living room. Alice pops in at 5 p.m. each day with a tray of martinis and lots of Phyllis Schlafly opinions.
You guessed it. Don and Catherine revive their hots. Gwen is hurt, but she's currently so unhappy in marriage to Don she decides to take teen son Julian back to New York for the summer for the two of them to go to school. Four-year-old son Devon remains behind with Don. And Catherine. A summer of role reversal is put into play -- Gwen tries on an academic gown while Catherine plays surrogate mommy for Devon between all-nighters with Don doing films, beer, pizza and sex. Avery acts as the play's fool, 2015 style : she's glib and chippy and full of cyber-fed "knowiness". In a truly fun turn of events, Avery winds up siding with Alice, old enough to be her Grandma, in setting everything back to their inevitable pathways by play's end.
Clever script humour, attempts at 'seriousity' : Gionfriddo is intent to examine lifestyle choices. "Time and perspective have changed," she told L.A. Magazine two years ago, "but the dilemma of whether you can have two high-achieving partners in one relationship...hasn't been sorted out." (Don was once a potential "high achieving" academic : now he's apparently content with his misfit counselor mediocrity : "What does he know better than drinking and failing?" Gwen asks early on.)
Gionfriddo expected little male uptake on her theme about women's struggles : "I thought women would 'respond' and men would 'be polite'. My brother said it's the only play of mine he 'responded' to." Maybe this is the heart of it : Catherine describes what she identifies as her existential despair : "In a relationship between two people you can't both go first. The question is is the other person willing to sacrifice and follow you? Maybe men aren't hard-wired to follow women."
Or, as highlighted in the program, another cut at it from Catherine : "Feminism asserted that women have a right to the same opportunities as men. What feminism has arguably left unfinished is how two empowered people are supposed to negotiate all this fantastic equality."
Avery challenges : "Isn't having a family a recipe for misery?" she asks. "Your husband could leave you and your kids grow up and leave, and then you're fucked." She adds a telling observation : "So, you can have a career and be lonely and sad or you can have a family and be lonely and sad...?"
Throughout Gionfriddo's script there are examinations how film themes have morphed in response to feminist and anti-war impulses afoot in America. E.g. slasher films as male producers' reply to the liberation of women. By play's end young Avery posits : "I like the slasher films where the final girl in those movies, the girl who fights for her life and wins -- where the guy won't come in anymore and save her -- but she'll be okay." That, it turns out, is about the extent of "progress" women can seem to expect in current society, Gionfriddo suggests : a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
Acting high-lights X5 : What Director Aaron Craven achieves best in the piece is not only his casting but his dialogue timing, emphasis, and emotional draw. Clearly from the get-go his conception of the script was spot-on : "In our fair city of Vancouver, the cost of living dictates a two income household. Local families with advanced educations struggle to fit career fulfillment, child rearing, romance, bill paying and 'me time' into a 24 hour day. Empowered young singles populate the new condos and bars while the dating scene...continues to be viewed through the matrix of 'stuck up' women and 'weird metrosexual' men...As our social paradigms shift faster than ever, our age-old quest for happiness remains."
To single out any of the five superb actors might be a tad unfair, so let's hi-lite them all. Moya O'Connell as Catherine absolutely aced her role from minute one to minute 120. Lori Triolo's emotional explosion at the start of Act 2 was sublime : "If you reject the sphere of family and home you may not like it. If you give up being a homemaker, you better be sure it was all worth it!" she yells at Catherine who is now clearly an adulterer right in Gwen's back yard. Courtney Shields as the youthy provocateur in the piece was a hoot, while impish Mom Anna Hagan was just plain fun. C- slacker & wanker & toker Robert Moloney was the character every red-blooded male I know fears he could become if he weren't vigilant. When men stop working at turning toward their mates rather than toward their computer screens, beware! the result, gentlemen. A clever well-finessed performance.
Who gonna like : In a week when as a reviewer I've lived through the emotion of dementia demise by Rubyslippers at the Cultch, and now self-actualization confrontations by Mitch and Murray Productions at Studio 16, I confess to a wee bit of emotional whack-out. At the end, Rapture, Blister, Burn is more rom-com than serious gritty grab-you-by-the-throat drama that a David Mamet script almost always is. Still, this is small-stage excellence of a recurring intimate theme in our society : as Even Cowgirls Get The Blues novelist Tom Robbins famously said, "Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that, and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon." You can't miss getting a hint of what the purpose of this week's full moon is if you go see this stunning production.
Particulars : Playwright Gina Gionfriddo. Produced by Mitch and Murray Productions. On thru November 28th at the Studio 16 on West 7th at Fir. Run-time 120 minutes with a 15-minute intermission. Phone 604.872.0075.
Production team : Director Aaron Craven. Co-Producer Anne Marie Deluise. Assistant Director / Publicist Chelsea Turner. Stage Manager Christie Maxson. Set Designer David Roberts. Lighting Designer Gerald King. Communications / Production Assistant Kate Isaac. Front of House / Productions Manager Michael Coen Chase.
Performers : Anna Hagan (Alice). Robert Moloney (Don). Moya O'Connell (Catherine). Courtney Shields (Avery). Lori Triolo (Gwen). .
Addendum #1 : Upon exiting the theatre, I chanced upon CISL 650 AM on my truck radio. Appropriately & coincidentally they were playing the 1968 haunting ballad by the Scot, Mary Hopkin, who had just that summer signed on as Apple Records' first solo artist (Paul McCartney's label). Her lyrics in "Those Were The Days My Friend" were profoundly prescient of the Gionfriddo script that came along some 45 years later :
Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours
And dreamed of all the great things we could do?
Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd life the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.
Then the busy years went rushing by us
We lost our starry notions on the way
If by chance I'd see you in the tavern
We'd smile at one another and we'd say
Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd life the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days, la, la, la.
Just tonight I stood before the tavern
Nothing seemed the way it used to be
In the glass I saw a strange reflection
Was that lonely woman really me?
Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd life the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days, la, la, la.
Through the door there came familiar laughter
I saw your face and heard you call my name
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same.
Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd life the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days, la, la, la.
It's the emptiness that follows you down
It's the ached inside when it all burns out
It's poisonous, if muscles it aches
It's everything you had when it breaks.
It's the emptiness that's all you have left
Too terrified of your frozen breath
It's a bitter mouth, it's buttered and knifed
It's the awful truth you fight for your life
It might as well, it might as well hurt
It might as well, it might as well
I went down to rescue you
I went all the way down
Fill your hungry wretched life
Here they come it's closing time.
It's the bitter root, it's twisted inside,
It's the heart you used to have when it died
It's the emptiness, it poisons, it lies
It's everything that you'll never find
It might as well, it might as well hurt
It might as well, it might as well
I went down for the remains
Sort through all your blurs and stains
Take your rapture blister burns
Stand in line it's not your turn
All dressed in red
Always the bride
Off with her head
All dressed in white
Off with her head
I went down to rescue you
I went all the way down
I went down for the remains
Sort through all the blurs and stains
Ooo ooo I will follow you
Anytime, anywhere
Ooo ooo and I'll come for you
Just say you don't care, ahhh.
-30-
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