Everything You Touch: Theater review by Helen Shaw
Sheila Callaghan’s dream-logic plays teem with blissed-out monologues and random acts of intensity. Dramaturgically, her plots tend to be all dessert, so while Everything You Touch can be thrillingly sour, it’s still oversweet.
In this fable, schlubby computer programmer Jess (a vivid Miriam Silverman) learns her estranged mother is dying, so she throws her recent—possibly hallucinatory—romantic conquest into the car and heads south. In alternating scenes, 40 years earlier, fashion designer Victor (Christian Coulson) faces some ill-defined arty challenges, like deciding between two slavish muses. The timelines converge in a particularly icky way: Victor is simultaneously Jess’s future father and her imaginary sex buddy. Barf! Clearly, the makers want our stomachs turning: Victor insults Jess (“Your ass looks like two pigs fighting over a Milk Dud”), and his runway models serve as furniture while wearing elaborate props.
There’s galvanizing anger here, a contagious nausea about women’s self-hatred—but Callaghan’s text keeps shying back to quasi-lyrical uplift. It’s a mistake to scramble the two modes together: Syrup doesn’t mix with bile.—Helen Shaw
Cherry Lane Theatre (see Off Broadway). By Sheila Callaghan. Dir. Jessica Kubzansky. With ensemble cast. 2hrs 20mins. One intermission.