Tynan's Anger

If you’re looking for the most savage depiction of the plight of the college-educated young woman struggling to manage work/life balance, don’t look to Sex and the City, Real Housewives of New York, or even the Fight Club spoof on last week’s 30 Rock. Instead, you’ll find it at UNDER St. Marks in Caitlin and the Swan, yet another fine production by The Management. In an adult working girls' night out, everything is going relatively normally until you hear a beast bellowing from behind the stage so loudly that it seems more fitting for a Martin McDonagh play. Yet it turns out that the bellow is from Peter the Pig, the new physical relationship (or as the kids call it these days, fuck buddy) of married, bored, and still virile Rachel (Teresa Stephenson). Peter, in the world of this play, isn’t just a metaphorical pig. 

That her friends don’t walk out in disgust is a sign that playwright Dorothy Fortenberry did not have realism in mind when writing Caitlin and the Swan, but the emotional plight of the women who make up the play is as real as anything. All three of the central female characters have a different species that brings out their animal instincts: Rachel her pig, Indian lesbian gynecologist Priya (Shetal Shah) a cat, and Caitlin (the exceptionally versatile Marguerite French), whose indecision becomes the central focus of the play, the Swan that haunts the lawn of the too-smart-for-his-own-good Bastian (Jake Aron) whom Caitlin is SAT tutoring.

As the choreography, costumes, and names indicate, Caitlin and the Swan is something of a revisionist feminist adaptation of Swan Lake: in addition to the gender reversal of who woos the swan, while Tchaikovsky’s ballet focused on marriage and commitment, Caitlin and the Swan focuses on pure sexual desire. The endings are reversed as well; the ballet ends with a sad but beautiful romantic image of forlorn lovers falling into the sea, while Fortenberry’s play ends happily with Caitlin satisfied with her life but having had to perform a senseless act of violation and destruction to trigger that ending.

The impossibility of total happiness is a common enough theme, but it applies especially to the female graduate of an elite undergraduate education. In today's world, the Working Girl romantic vision of the dual life of a professional woman has been shattered, but the Stepford Wives vision hasn't come back either. Instead, we now have a real world where 60% of female graduates of Yale plan to sacrifice parts of their careers when they have children, where the ever-increasing dominance of the online word is plagued with rampant anonymous misogyny — yet the Sex and the City myth of being able to live single life to the fullest still pervades our culture.

Fortenberry, a Yale School of Drama alumna who may very well have conceived parts of Caitlin and the Swan while that debate raged at Yale, has a keen eye for reducing larger social mores to the world of individual characters — however twisted that world may be — without reducing the characters themselves. Occasionally, she can let these larger themes override naturalistic dialogue or total consistency, but her occasional lapses in Caitlin and the Swan are more than made up for by the originality in her expression.

Along with director Joshua Conkel, who showed his willingness to depict the role of rural deviancy in a larger American framework in September’s The Chalk Boy, Caitlin and the Swan marks The Management’s rapid ascent towards becoming one of the leading voices of downtown Manhattan theater; The Management's audience has grown with each production I’ve seen, and if the economy forces theater dilettantes to go further off-Broadway to avoid high ticket prices, all the better, as half the shows currently on Broadway don’t have the keen vision of what American theater needs that The Management has constantly displayed through black box productions.

Finally, there's another cultural factor in play here that may make Caitlin and the Swan an even more significant work in future generations. With themes of bestiality expressed so frankly and without a consideration for realism, Caitlin and the Swan may be the first major play to address a subculture that most online media users caustically acknowledge, but few outside that world dare consider. Rick Santorum supporters, hide your eyes: we now have a play that addresses furry fandom in full force.

For those without exposure to the full underbelly of the Internet, furry fandom is the online subculture of anthropomorphized animal enthusiasts, often with a sexual fetish involved. If you’ve interacted with college or high school students recently, read enough Inside Baseball Internet nerd blogs, or researched the history of Second Life, you’re probably aware of this culture. If not, be prepared for the next alternate lifestyle battle our culture will be facing, shortly after American society has addressed the homosexuality and transgendered debate.

This fetish freaks me out, but I've learned not to question cultural trends once they become established on the Internet. Once that issue becomes a mainstream topic, however, expect future generations to look at Caitlin and the Swan as a launching point in the theatrical debate. Whether or not she has intended this to be the case, Fortenberry has taken the furry fetish and both made it real in her theatrical world, and expressed how real-world members of the subculture can address the issue. For the moment, however, it's just as easy to treat Caitlin and the Swan as a fun, smart, and raucous experience that addresses current American issues in The Management's trademark slanted style, in addition to pointing to where things are going in the future.

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Caitlin and the Swan by Dorothy Fortenberry; directed by Joshua Conkel; choreography by Croft Vaughn; original music by Colin Wambsgans; sound design by Adam Swiderski; costume design by Caite Hevner; set design by Timothy McCown Reynolds; lighting design by Kelsi Welter and Conkel; photos by Moira Stone.

Starring Jake Aron (Bastian), Brian Robert Burns (Doug), Elliott Reiland (Pig/Swan), Marguerite French (Caitlin), Shetal Shah (Priya), and Teresa Stephenson (Rachel).

Labels: 2009-2010, caitlin and the swan, dorothy fortenberry, Horse Trade Theater Group, joshua conkel, new york, off-off-Broadway, the management company, theater review, under st. marks

The Chalk Boy, perhaps more than any other play in recent memory, treats teenage girls as more than caricatures. Its characters are all human beings with human problems, whose flaws are just as tragic as those of characters from Chekhov, Caryl Churchill, or Ibsen. Their identity crises and their views on religion, destiny, and hope touch the same themes that have been touched by thinkers far removed from small town America. Two of the girls resort to witchcraft for the same reason people have been resorting to religion, drugs, art, or any other form of escape for as long as there’s been civilization: being alive is too painful without some sort of outlet.

Of course, all that’s in the undercurrent of what is in actuality a very funny play. The darker implications of the story are hidden in a black box of teen girl slang, with “kisses, bitches” and enough “bitches” “sluts” and “ho-bags” to convince you that you’re in high school all over again. Linguists argue that the popular bitchy middle- and high-school girls are the origins of new developments in American English, and while I’m too far removed from this period to say if playwright/director Joshua Conkel’s catalog of slang is completely accurate, he’s certainly developed a deftly-tuned ear for the meter and intensity of teen girl speak.

Marguerite French and Mary Catherine Donnelly narrate the play (they’re, what do you call it…omniscient!) as Trisha Sorensen and Lauren Radley, leaders of the Christian Varsity Youth, giving a presentation and hoping you’ll drink the orangeade they made. Both actors provide the comical framework and help establish a brilliant use of the limited Under St. Marks venue. They also take on any other role that is needed in a pinch, and while the fourth-wall breaking is somewhat too lackadaisical for my liking, it does provide Conkel with a number of tools for his storytelling. The play is somber, but almost always funny; its presentation is adolescent, but still intellectually challenging.

Another of The Chalk Boy’s greatest strengths is the unflinching honesty and bleakness it ascribes to small town America. Clear Creek, Washington is “one of those towns,” Conkel puts it - and as a native of one of those towns himself, his insights into the utter despair that grips these small towns is spot on. The play also highlights how blind most theater audiences—and New York audiences in particular—can often be to how the other half of America lives.

The play centers around the presumed abduction of a relatively popular boy named Jeffrey Chalk, who has gone missing and is presumed dead. This has been a problem with Clear Creek in the past and will continue to be. A curfew is instated, mothers and teachers become paranoid, and girls who are in love with Jeffrey start behaving even more nastily than they did before.

Chalk’s disappearance is the main motivation allowing the girls to feel comfortable asserting their own feelings about life, love, spirituality, and all that blah blah blah. Penny Lauder (Jennifer Harder) is perhaps the most complete character in the play; she experiences a false pregnancy from Jeff but refuses to believe it's false, with the same intensity and obvious futility with which she refuses to believe that Jeff is dead (futility is a recurring theme here). She sees herself as either unlucky, unredeemable, or just plain unlovable, destined to follow in the footsteps of her trailer-trash mother who also had a teen pregnancy. Her vaguely creepy, obviously confused friend Breanna (Kate Huisentruit), future Smith College material, tries to express love and affection for Penny that she knows can never truly be reciprocated until she gets out of this shit town.

The actors often struggle with the wide-ranging, constantly shifting emotional baggage of the play, both explicit and implicit. Conkel makes jokes about his characters’ limited vocabulary, yet they sometimes take on large themes in language too astute for a fifteen-year-old. But perfect consistency was a goal that Conkel was rightly willing to overlook with The Chalk Boy for the larger pursuit of taking the small-town American teen girl into existential territory, and his results are almost always grippingly poignant. You’ll more readily drink the comedic orangeade during the play, but you’ll leave it with a much deeper affliction.

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The Chalk Boy, written and directed by Joshua Conkel. Starring Jennifer Harder (Penny Lauder), Marguerite French (Trisha Sorensen and others), Kate Huisentruit (Breanna Stark), and Mary Catherine Donnelly (Lauren Radley and others). Photo by John Alexander.

The Chalk Boy runs through September 20 at the Under St. Marks theater. Tickets can be purchased here.

This review was initially published on Blogcritics.

Labels: 2008-2009, joshua conkel, off-off-Broadway, the chalk boy, theater review, under st. marks