SEX AND DESPERATION: Sex, Lies and Audiotape

Lynn Morton, directing the 2009 Baltimore Playwrights Festival entry at the Spotlighters this season, comments in the program, "Sex, companionship and the desperation to obtain it are all connected," and sex and desperation are indeed the themes of the four one-act performances now on stage through Sept. 6th.

The Spotlighters bills this four-course meal of carnal delights as "something for everyone," and this applies to both the audience and the actors as the cast of Megan Therese Rippey, Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, Alex Hewett, Lexi Martinez, Andrew Syropoulos and Daniel Douek clearly enjoyed playing a variety of colorful roles ranging from a caveman to a frog to a mermaid.

Let's start with the caveman. The first piece, "Leap Day" by Lee Sapperstein, has some fun exploring modern relationship dynamics in the setting of the Pleistocene period. Rippey and and Ebrahimzadeh portray Zera and Og, a kind of Fred Flintstone and Wilma before they were married, a couple who try to get beyond the man-clubs-woman-drags-her-by-hair-to-the-cave phase.

Through the process, Og learns that women like flowers, want to a "partnership" and have a thing for drummers. As Og channels Ringo Starr from the 1981 movie, CAVEMAN, banging out a rhythm with a mastodon bone, Zera encourages him to dance...and he can't. Of course. Men can't dance, even when they're Neanderthals. The piece is a light, comical look at male-female stereotypes (women crave romance and foreplay; men grunt a lot and worry about what "the guys will think"), and in the end, despite the "leap day" reversal of roles--woman in charge, man subservient--it's back to the cave for a little whoopee.

Sex plays a different role in the second play, "Monitors on the Quad" by Julie Lewis. Somewhat reminiscent of a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode, this morality tale explores the question, what if concepts like Justice and Freedom were actually manipulated by a single individual...some chainsmoking bureaucrat lifted from Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL perhaps who, for a paycheck, a blanket, and some long underwear has the ability to ease war, help veterans get their pay, lower taxes, stop pollution? Ebrahimzadeh plays the nebbishy Alexander P., a man who won't take a bribe, but might be susceptible to other temptations...like Lorraine, played with vampish delight by Ms. Hewett. And we all know what happens when Justice gets preoccupied with other things...gasoline goes to $4 a gallon.

If sex is a weapon in "Monitors," it's a rite of passage in Michael Stang's "The Imperfect Hour." Syropoulos plays Martin, an uptight 20-year-old virgin who looks like he should be knocking on doors as a Jehovah's Witness, but instead arrives at a brothel with a bouquet of flowers and hopes of arriving in a promised land of a different sort, wink-wink. Douek excels as the brothel's manager, a mix used car salesman and prurient, pimpy Socrates to the young student, Martin. The Manager is worldly, experienced, dressed like an street scene extra from "Starsky and Hutch," and with a knowledge of STDs that would rival an inner city OB/GYN. Martin cannot afford $500 "perfection"--Alex Hewett's "Prostitute," who sashays past him in a silk dress in a role that lasts all of three seconds, but has it's va-va-va-voom-effect--but what can he get for $40? The hilarious answer to that question may require a Hazmat suit.

Hewett trades in her little black dress for some fins in Gina Young's "Salt Water," playing a coquettish mermaid who speaks in rhymes, pines for boys, and chats up two friends-rivals-lovers(?), Sybil (Rippey) and Alison (Martinez) on a beach in New Jersey. 

"Salt Water" is somewhat disjointed, as it doesn't follow a linear path, nor much of a logical path either as first Sybil and Alison appear to be two young, entitled, I-know-everything-and-you-don't extras from "Gossip Girl," flush with the excitement of destroying the unseen "Emily" (though how they destroyed her or why they did is never explained), then appear to be lesbian lovers, or perhaps bisexual...and one of them may also be someone namEd Heather.

Toss in Ebrahimzadeh as a teenage lifeguard, a frog prince, Copernicus (what, no Galileo?), and Todd, Sybil's GI boyfriend...and did I mention an asteroid that seems headed to destroy the earth?...and you have a lot of "whaaa?" looks from the audience.

The play seems to have something to do love and point of view. One can never truly know what another thinks or feels or imagines, because these are always in flux-they change. We love in one moment, we hate in the next, we crave the other today, we want them gone tomorrow. Perhaps the best line in this play is "Love is when you're always writing a letter in your head to someone." Whoever that someone is, that's the oNe You love. Now sex, that's another matter...

Kudos to the entire cast which does an exemplary job playing an array of characters from steely administrators to philosophy professors. As always, the Spotlighters creative crew, including lighting, sound, set and costume designers Sarah May, Brad J. Ranno, Michelle Datz and Helenmary Ball, make less so much more.

            "Sex and Desperation" runs Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m., now through September 6^th at the Spotlighters Theatre located at 817 Saint Paul Street.  Tickets are $18; seniors, students and Baltimore Theater Alliance (BTA) members, $15. For more information, call 410-752-1225 or visit www.spotlighters.org.

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.