In Anna Jordan’s play, who are the freaks of the title? Are they the two characters who tell what women like or (mostly) don’t about their sexual experience and men? Or are they the talked-about men who have pressured and exploited the women? Director V Craig Heidenreich helps the latter indulge in an exploration that they seem to find necessary to share with us. Perhaps, in doing so, they gain some of the control that, we find out, the women lost.
A room with mirrored floor and a huge bed under a collage of colorful feminine clothes and years of mementos sets the scene that’s metaphoric, if static, for mostly narrative monologues by 15 year old Leah (Ellie McCaw, touchingly real) alternating with in-her-early-30s Georgie. In episodic fashion, Leah continually leaves her side of the bed to go through what seem like rehearsals preceding her oft-questioned first sexual experience with the BMOC of her junior high school class. Georgie (formidable Summer Dawn Wallace) stays in her side of the bed, where she begins by waking from a persistent dreadful dream. She gets up only to change clothes, as she tells how she was left by her long-time lover and, under the influence of drink and drugs, decided to make herself wanted. In taking a job as a lap dancer in a strip joint, she agreed “to be a thing” since it meant being desired by men she could turn into just animals. This led to a devastating sexual experience that Wallace fully re-creates in length and excruciatingly explicit, acted-out detail. Being in the present in each episode of her monologues, Leah expresses the conflict with her boyfriend and within herself that supplies the drama, continually making us wonder what she will do and how it will affect her. Although Wallace’s powerful acting lets us see what made Georgie change, that crucial action was in the past, thus always narrative. We don’t really see why, as eventually she and Leah finally come together, Georgie seems different. Is she putting on a good show as Leah’s (a sudden revelation) aunt, giving good advice? Throughout Freaks, Leah wears a youngster’s p.j.s with green pants full of toy bears and jolly red top. Georgie has donned them at the finale. Does that mean Georgie’s leading a more innocent life? Has Leah changed places with her sexually experienced aunt? Or do both still want to be wanted, but in different ways? So what? Is Anna Jordan’s writing so strong that few will question the point it makes? Or am I a kind of “freak” for doing so? (I may also be one for having become bored by the length of Georgie’s spectacular monologue or questioning how so many men could have together penetrated “all” of Georgie’s openings at the same time, or is she a freak with more than three?) Since Urbanite’s first show of the new season seems to be already sold out, it may well be extended so that questioners can give it a second consideration. If only the demanding roles don’t put the actresses in bed from fatigue!
