The yawn-inducing conceit of Sheila Callaghan’s new play That Pretty Pretty; or,The Rape Play is that sometimes heterosexual white men can be pricks. Zing! Take that all you male playwrights who present fantasies of women in your plays instead of actual women. But then, why are all of Callaghan’s characters such clichés?
Former strippers Agnes (Lisa Joyce) and Valerie (Danielle Slavick) are kick-ass women who fight against leering men by hitting up pro-life conventions and picking up a drunken slob and killing him in their motel room. Or is Agnes just a character on Valerie’s blog? Or are they both just characters in a screenplay being written by Owen (Greg Keller), while he watches Jane Fonda’s workout videos for inspiration in writing women with unassailable dignity. Of course, Owen’s idea of unassailable dignity is a hot Puerto Rican lipstick lesbian who never cries, no matter how many times she’s raped.
But Callaghan’s play is as heavy on technique as it is on politics. Scenes between Agnes and Valerie are repeated verbatim with Owen and his best friend Rodney (Joseph Gomez); Jane Fonda herself (played by a ceaselessly smiling Annie McNamara) pops into scenes to dispense life and fitness advice as the ideal of feminism (is Jane Fonda really still anyone’s feminist role model?); the four leads all sit down in elegant clothes to an interminable dinner that’s one long pause occasionally punctuated by dialogue. And of course, there’s simulated sex, urination and Jell-O wrestling.
Despite Callaghan’s obvious writing chops, she comes across as a less-polished Diablo Cody, peppering her script with “quirky” dialogue like, “Rockness! I am the Rockness Monster!” And though Agnes and Valerie’s annoying tics are partially explained away, there’s no explanation for why Callaghan’s male characters are so relentlessly stereotypical—unless she was motivated purely by revenge on all those playwrights she’s taken issue with.
Luckily, the cast is game for anything Callaghan throws at them, from Joyce humping a corpse’s leg to Keller giving birth in drag. But Kip Fagan’s role as director is unclear, given the free-for-all happening on stage. He would do well to tone down Agnes and Valerie’s ear-rattling shouts in the early scenes and to punch up that endless dinner sequence so that audience members don’t lapse into slumber.The script may be a hodgepodge of potshots, but there’s no reason Fagan couldn’t try to present the disparate pieces as parts of a whole. Unfortunately, That Pretty Pretty feels like a barely connected series of vignettes culled from various Fringe Festival shows rather than a sustained attack on the way women are portrayed by both the media and artists.Without focus, Callaghan’s intended incendiary attack ends up engulfed in its own flames.
> That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play
Through March 15. Rattlestick Theatre, 224 Waverly Pl. (betw. W. 11th and Perry Sts.), 212-868-4444; times vary, $40.
