Rites

directed by katya Nelhams-Wright

at the Loeb Experimental Theater

One or two emphatic jabs at our moral complacency is sometimes a good thing; it disturbs our well-constructed balance, leaving us to question our own beliefs. But too many jabs and pokes and prods surely leave us unfeeling, perhaps dead. In about 40 minutes, Rites attempts to elucidate the broad ideological clashes between a half-dozen groups of women, throwing in for good measure a suicide attempt, demonic chants, the public undressing of a little boy, and an all-out "gender-cide" and cremation. Too much is just too much.

Director and set-designer Katya Nelhams-Wright has created a claustrophobic environment where the entire play, set inside a public women's lavatory in future London, is enclosed in a cotton mesh cage. This effect at once alienates the audience by presenting a translucent physical barrier, and draws the audience in--with both the audience and the characters inches away from the mesh, one feels voyeuristic, peering in on the lives and private conversations of the all-woman cast.

Something has happened in the world, and we sense that it is along the lines of an Orwellian Big Brother phenomenon (could it be the television monitor perched near the ceiling, fixed on the characters below?). Ada and Meg (Yvonne Roemer and Calysta Drake) are chief-and assistant-washroom attendants, who encounter a series of women seeking a warm place to eat breakfast, to relieve themselves, and to expound their views on why men are wonderful and warm, beastly or boring.

The groups of women enter separately and stay on until the climactic ending. Three post-teeny boppers, freed by "technology" to "love" their men wholeheartedly, clash with a pair of prudish widows. Ada, who tells us she performs sex for money, possesses a cynicism which clashes with the young women's naivete about finding true love in the world. And a suicidal woman, who decides to kill herself because of her boyfriend, provides contrast to Ada's active resolve to do away with men's control over women, and to the widows' passive acquiescence to their husbands' control.

The language is blatant and sometimes crass. In this short play, it is a paradox that the dialogue should seem to drag on so uselessly, while the action seems to thunder on like machine-gun fire. This slaughters both the characters and the play. In rhythmic but nonsensical spurts, so much anger builds up in these women that they start to chant "BASTARD MEN! BASTARD MEN!" in an eery, Brave New World-like crescendo, and do it more than once. The fact that boys are made of "snaps and snails and puppy dogs' tails" is hissed visciously from the tongues of the characters, dripping with mockery. There just seems to be an eruptive release of anger in these words, with little background to justify it.

Yvonne Roemer as Ada plays the role with powerful spite, and as the initiator of most of the action, prods the other characters into deeper levels of hatred. She is vehement. The three post-teeny boppers, played by Jessica Yager, Bess Wohl, and Rashida Jones, are bubbly and keep effervescing until the climax leaves them flat. The two widows, played by Rebecca A. Murray and Jenni Paredes, provide timely comic relief; their speech oscillates between keen observation of the way things used to be and transparent example-setting for why they must change.

In the end, we just can't get past the fact that all of these women, of differing ideologies and upbringings, pounce on what they think is a man in their bathroom, and devour this person like a pack of wild dogs. After the kill, the soft-spoken question that crystallizes the moment drifts up into the air above the murderers' heads: "Ada--what will you do? Your promotion..." The roar of a powerful incinerator answers that question.

Rites consists of more than a few well-placed jabs to our conscience. It stabs relentlessly until the viewer, half-dead, is forced to nurse her own wounds at the cost of feeling empathy with the vague struggle on stage.