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A CurtainUp Review
American Sexy
| I hate it when you use big words.— Lexi
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Nicky Schmidlein as Jessica and Ron Washington as Darren
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In American Sexy, four too-cool-for-school college students stop at the Grand Canyon en route to Las Vegas. In another generation, Las Vegas might have the detour on the way to the Canyon. Inversion, diversion and perversion are the order of the day in Trista Baldwin's largely unfocussed play, in which everyone pretends: to be hip, to have no feelings, to not care.
The Grand Canyon looks fake to the very blonde Jessica (Nicky Schmidlein), who prefers a photo of it, even while she's looking at it. Her deepest reaction to the site is, "It makes me wanna have sex outside." Artifice trumps reality in American Sexy; these kids fear realness but not reality show behavior.
Ms. Baldwin pours on the stupid far too liberally. Perhaps even more than she is aware of, she stereotypes her characters. The Asian-American Lexi (Satomi Blair) becomes a scheming dragon lady; the African-American Darren (Ron Washington) is hopelessly priapic; the blonde Jessica is naïve, needy and a bit dumb; and the Midwestern Andy (Scott Morse) is down to earth, prudish and slightly unhinged. They all smoke a lot of pot, so it's hard to determine when they're being serious and when they're just stoning out. Though Ms. Baldwin doesn't name the institution from which her characters hail, it's hard to imagine college students, anywhere, so willfully stupid, high or not.
Jessica and Lexi like to call each other "bitches" and "ho-bags." Earnestness is attacked as weakness. Purportedly . BFFs (best friends forever), they are cruel and withhold information from each other. Most of their interactions revolve around a threat to reveal a secret and, finally, the revelation of that secret. They bring each other down and deflate each other's expectations. Yet, they're not without their charms. Ms. Blair and Ms. Schmidlein display a bit of the chemistry that Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler had in Aerosmith's famous "Crazy" video. The men betray curious puritanical sensibilities and gender-based double standards. Super cool Darren wants to have sex with Jessica, or Jessica and Lexi together, anytime, anywhere, but when confronted with graphic evidence of Jessica's previous liaisons, he suddenly becomes laughably uptight. And the judgmental Andy bares his soul in a way that confounds the others. He is in love, a four-letter word truly foreign to this bunch. He nakedly reveals his emotions, something also quite alien to them, and gets predictably trashed for it. Pitifully earnest among this crowd, but with an intense edge, Andy is a slightly psychotic Holden Caulfield. Mr. Morse gets the best lines and they are so lopsidedly humorous and perceptive beside those of the other characters that I suspect Andy represents the true kernel of Ms. Baldwin's play.
The action moves quickly, thanks to very short lines (""I like bunnies." "Your toes smell like ass, Lex." "Ho-twat."). Despite the one-size-fits all dopiness, the characters occasionally say something incisive, as when Lexi woefully describes her traditional mother, who has sublimated her existence in order to care for her family: ". . ..she's not even a person."
But, alas, there's far too much vapid, frequently stoned, filler dialogue. American Sexy was once a one-act and Ms. Baldwin should have left it that way. One ultimately gets sick of every single one of these unsympathetic, and not really all that cool, characters. The play never really finds its focus, concentrating instead on successively over the top antics, as if it were mimicking a bad reality show.
Sound designer Colin Whitley does a great job with the timing of sound effects. That includes gunshots, birds and even cell phone videos.
Despite the best efforts of all four very talented Bats, Ms. Baldwin's characters remain underdeveloped; all are implausibly inconsistent and, ultimately, not very interesting.""""
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American Sexy By Trista Baldwin Directed by Mia Walker Cast: Satomi Blair (Lexi), Scott Morse (Andy), Nicky Schmidlein (Jessica), Ron Washington (Darren) Set Design: Kate Sinclair Foster Costume Design: Katie Hartsoe Lighting Design: Joe Chapman Sound Design: Colin Whitley Stage Manager: Kara Kaufman Running Time: 80 minutes; no intermission The Flea Theater, 41 White Street, NYC, www.theflea.org à Performance schedule: Saturdays @ 9pm, Sunday - Mondays @ 7pm, Thursday, February 10 @ 9pm, and Tuesday, February 22 @ 7pm Reviewed by William Coyle, based on January 23rd performance |
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Slings & Arrows-the complete set
You don't have to be a Shakespeare aficionado to love all 21 episodes of this hilarious and moving Canadian TV series about a fictional Shakespeare Company
