BWW Reviews: HartBeat Ensemble's RIDING THE TURNPIKE Drags the Strip

Riding the Turnpike
by Cindy Martinez & Debra Walsh
Directed by Steven Raider-Ginsburg
HartBeat Ensemble at the Carriage House Theater, 360 Farmington Avenue in Hartford now through May 18
www.hartbeatensemble.org

The Berlin Turnpike, a 12-mile stretch of box stores, chain restaurants, and family fun, hides a not-so-secret secret. Nestled between the Chuck E. Cheeses and Targets are very evident sex businesses: strip clubs, video stores, and shops selling sex toys. Equally visible are the dozens of no-tell motels, relics from a bygone era when Route 15 was a major conduit between New York and Hartford.

Offering hourly rates, low prices and theme rooms, many of these motels have become sites for escort services and "massage" appointments, prostitution by another name. Not so visible to the person speeding down the Berlin Turnpike on their way to a round of Laser Tag is that these motels have become de facto slave shacks for women conscripted into our national epidemic of sex trafficking.

HartBeat Ensemble, now celebrating its twelfth year of creating collaborative docu-drama in the Capital City, kicks open the locked doors on the sex trafficking scandal that is being perpetrated right under our noses. Riding the Turnpike is inspired by the book The Berlin Turnpike: A True Story of Human Trafficking in America and created using the ensemble's usual method of conducting interviews, in this case with actual sex workers/slaves. As with their earlier productions, HartBeat is the only company in Hartford that specifically tells this region's stories.

The first offering in HartBeat's new home, the Carriage House Theater, quickly lets the audience know that this is no longer the home of the previous tenant - The Hartford Children's Theatre. Mainly set in and around a strip club by the name of Trance Six, Riding the Turnpike is definitely not for the kiddies. Featuring simulated fellatio, sado-masochistic sex, adult language, drug usage, and violence, it is indeed a rough ride for the women who have been lured or forced into the sex trade.

The story finds Magic, the owner of Trance Six, about to be busted for sex trafficking. He knows that he will be in serious legal trouble if he doesn't raise funds for bail and a legal defense. Magic forces his already-strung-out stable of women to turn more tricks to bring in more money. Leveraging their various weaknesses - love, drugs, money and family - he bends each woman to his will while obliterating their freedom and showering them with lies.

What should be a gritty, in-your-face descent into the Hades of sex-trafficking, actually starts out not seeming quite so bad. The script, co-written by HartBeat Ensemble members Cindy Martinez and Debra Walsh, paints Magic as a wrongdoer, but actor Herb Newsome betrays little actual menace. Among a pimp's arsenal is a certain degree of magnetizing charm that is later shed as he deploys beatings, addiction and financial withholdings to maintain control. Newsome may be eschewing a stereotyped pimp, but he is supposed to be a man with few morals. For much of his portrayal, he seems more like a Best Buy Manager having a bad day.

The women, initially, seem to be a family unit with little internal strife. In fact, they don't seem too unhappy to be in the business. This seems to ring false as one cannot help but feel that the culture of violence and repression that keeps them locked in place may be replicated in their internal interactions. There are hints of friction and betrayal, but there seems to be a truly perilous lack of anger, danger, fear and resentment.

Taneisha Duggan, Cindy Martinez, Caitlin McInerney and Michelle Mount all dig in to their respective parts and submit themselves to some fairly degrading acts that are routine for trafficked women on the Turnpike. One of the most insidious things missed by the production is that oftentimes the prostitutes barely qualify as women, with many being conscripted into sexual slavery and online pornography between the ages of 12 and 14.

The women all represent the different types of ways a pimp will victimize a prostitute. None of them represent the thousands of women who are rounded up on foreign shores and smuggled into the U.S. with the express purpose of being treated as slaves. Conversely, this does highlight that "the girl next door" could end up strapped to a bed and gang-raped in a Berlin Turnpike motel.

The standout in the cast, oddly, is neither pimp nor prostitute. Bryan Swormstedt portrays Rayne, a misguided youth similarly seduced into Magic's underworld. Initially used as club entertainment between strip acts, the character ends up a patsy. Magic starts bad and ends up worse. The women start out destitute and end up worse. Swormstedt's jittery Rayne, on the other hand, becomes multi-dimensional as his eyes are opened to the hideous world surrounding him. The ending is rather abrupt and somewhat unsatisfying as the fates of every character are left unresolved, some more than others.

HartBeat Ensemble Co-Founder and the production's director Steven Raider-Ginsburg keeps the fleet 85-minute production moving and shows his growth as an artist. The production marks a definite technical advance for the company, taking full advantage of their new space. High-tech projections help add a faceless, nameless and villainous missing character: the john. HartBeat's well-intentioned and gritty Riding the Turnpike may encounter a few bumps, but at least it takes a step toward giving voice to the usually faceless victims of the sex trade: the girls and women.

Photo of Herb Newsome and Cindy Martinez by LJB Special Photography.

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