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

(This review was originally published on Blogcritics)

"Postmodernism is a theory that eats itself" is a line repeated twice in Kristen Kosmas' challenging, confounding play The Scandal! It seems that Kosmas, is determined to see just how far she can go in testing that assertion. Pink, The Scandal!'s protagonist (played here for the first time not by Kosmas herself but by another actress, Amy Patrice Golden), lives without any advanced awareness of reality, yet shows flashes of understanding that keep her from living in a completely dreamlike state.

Pink is what we would define as an emotionally unstable woman, with an emotionally removed mother and a small but twisted social circle in an isolated desert town. Pink's own isolation, however, is more personal than social or geographical. Perhaps The Scandal!'s greatest accomplishment is its ability to reduce the contradictions and instability of postmodernism into the existence of a singe individual.

The Management Company, one of the rising companies of the Horse Trade Theater Group, is establishing a distinct reputation for producing magical realist perspectives on broken pieces of Americana. More than any other company, The Management presents New York with theatrical visions of bleak American rural life. The cognitive dissonance of the two settings provided a minor controversy when The Management's last show, Joshua Conkel's The Chalk Boy, received universally positive reviews except for one particularly jaded review: the New York Times's. While The Management's reach is still small, the Times affair may have done more than anything else to catapult the Management to the status of one of New York's hottest hole-in-the-wall theater companies.

The Scandal! is much less accessible than The Chalk Boy, and probably not as good an overall production, but it's a show of almost unfathomable depth, deeply personal soul-searching, and a surprising level of danger. The Scandal! challenges the audience to form a bond with a woman of deeply tangential thinking, whom we know from the start will either kill herself, burn her house down, or both. Until the last possible moment, the audience is even more baffled about what's really going on than Pink is herself.

Part of the problem with The Management's production is that Kosmas's deeply personal play translates somewhat awkwardly to another actor's hands. Golden looks and feels the role of Pink, with a face older and more vulnerable-looking than her still-in-her-prime body. While Golden is a little inconsistent with her physical expression of Pink, the moments when she hits the right notes are absolutely devastating. More problematic is Golden's delivery of Kosmas's unique dialogue. Golden's pacing is disappointingly monotonous, with the breaks occurring at more or less the same time in every sentence. Her vocal inflections also lack the right level of variety.

I did not see Kosmas perform her own lines, and I cannot judge how much of the production's inconsistency is the product of Kosmas herself, Golden, or Courtney Sale's direction. But strangely, that ambiguity seems right for a play that focuses so intently on personalizing and outwardly expressing a world of ideas. Despite the production's flaws, it's better for the play's sake that The Management makes the personal and the intellectual so inseparable in The Scandal!

The deeper you get into The Scandal!, the more it seems like the play's parable of postmodernism will never eat itself. Eventually, and unexpectedly, however, Pink suddenly finds herself in the realm of reality. Her life becomes more normal, her social sphere more stable, and her mind fully intact and aware, contrary to both Pink and everybody else's expectations (audience included). Some may find this conciliatory final note maddening, but it's a twist that proves strangely uplifting. In the end, it's not that postmodernism eats itself, but that reality finds a way to purge postmodernism from your system.

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The Scandal!, by Kristen Kosmas; directed by Courtney Sale; set design by James Carney; costume design by Peggy Vivino; technical design by Kelsi Welter; sound design by Josh Conkel; original music by Kosmas. Photos by John Alexander.

Starring Amy Patrice Golden (Pink).

The Scandal! runs through December 20 at the Red Room, 85 East 4th Street. Tickets can be purchased at www.horseTRADE.info.

Labels: 2008-2009, amy patrice golden, Horse Trade Theater Group, kristen kosmas, new york, off-off-Broadway, the management company, the scandal, theater review