Theater review by Helen Shaw
Julia Jarcho’s witchy high-school comedy Pathetic tries to capture both the starting-pistol sensation of girlhood and the halfway-through-the-race feeling of a middle-aged woman. The play is ostensibly a riff on Racine’s Phèdre, in which a queen’s lust triggers intergenerational disaster, but stylistically it is a school-locker collage, taped together from John Hughes movies and The Craft. It’s silly, often, and very funny. But its portrait of libido as our animating electricity is bleak, too: as fatestruck and gloomy as any ancient tragedy.
When we meet 16-year-old Consuelo (Kim Gainer) and her mother, Rosario (Linda Mancini), they are falling asleep in front of the TV as a supercut of erotic male images from Brad Pitt to Kurt Cobain washes over them. The women shift and moan. What can they do with this restless energy? The next day, Rosario tries to seduce a dim young Loewe’s clerk (an adorably doofy Jordan Baum); she seems hardly in control. At least Consuelo has the consolation of her high-school coven, goth Millie (Kristine Haruna Lee) and Carla (Jennifer Seastone), a homicidal mean girl who bosses her teacher/lover (Ben Jalosa Williams) around like a dog. All this simultaneous sexual hunger isn’t coincidental: The power-obsessed girls plan to invoke Venus through various rituals, but the goddess has already possessed Millie and begun exacting her secret tribute.
Jarcho writes, as always, like gangbusters, making comic meals for her company members: Williams, who designs and runs the sound when he isn’t in a scene, is particularly hilarious and shifty as the oozy Mr. Goader, and Mancini, who speaks right behind the beat, has a way of detonating jokes just…after you expect them. The humor descends into darkness and mucks around in there, getting dirty, but the much-referred-to magic itself remains a missing element. The production, designed by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, looks like it was made by the high-schoolers themselves: stage curtains created from black trash bags and projections so washed out by light that we can just barely discern the footage—is that a shower scene?—flickering on the wall. It’s a great, scrappy backdrop for the ridiculous parts, but then the play asks us to pivot into horror. For that, the show needs a different level of aesthetic control: The dialogue insists that Venus has come, but without a spectacle worthy of her, the goddess refuses to manifest.
Abrons Arts Center (Off-Off Broadway). Written and directed by Julia Jarcho. With ensemble cast. Running time: 1hr 25mins. No intermission.
Follow Helen Shaw on Twitter: @Helen_E_Shaw
Follow Time Out Theater on Twitter: @TimeOutTheater
Keep up with the latest news and reviews on our Time Out Theater Facebook page