O.P.C.

by Kilian Melloy
Wednesday Dec 10, 2014
Original Link: http://www.edgeboston.com/entertainment/theatre/reviews//169216/opc

Eve Ensler tackles the waste stream, resource management, and existential fears that human beings are literally trashing themselves and the planet. The A.R.T.’s production takes these themes seriously — so much so that there are no paper programs for the show, and the set is constructed largely of cast-offs, discards, and, well, junk.

Putting it plainly, rubbish rules in this production. Scenic designer Brett J. Banakis has clearly had fun creating a set from boxes, festooning the performance space with plastic water bottles and flanking it with dumpsters. Single gloves are strung across the ceiling like Tibetan prayer flags; there’s a festive, rather than foetid, atmosphere about this joyously trashy space, which harbors an oasis of polished neat newness among the rubble. (More on that later.)

The ethos is unfettered tree-hugging environmentalism with a “waste not, want not” overtone. The show’s pre-reorder announcements include the warning, “If for some reason you are drinking forma plastic bottle, cut it out.” (Beverages, including water, are served in compostable cups.) Guilty as charged, I quickly stowed my Poland Springs bottle from sight. (It’s okay. I recycled it later.)

The design sensibility sets the tone. The play centers around a bright young woman named Romi (Oliva Thirlby), a self-described “freegan” who retrieves unspoiled food from rubbish tips and waste receptacles and creates her own “high trashion” clothing from unlikely scraps like plastic straws and fruit leather. (There’s a parade of quite attractive costumes, the work of Esosa, which is a highlight of the show. In fact, in lieu of a paper program on which to scribble notes for later reference, I’m going to have to leave myself a reminder right here: Esosa is a contender for any Best Costuming award.)

Romi is like a wood nymph — intelligent (she dropped out of Harvard), beautiful, and a creature of the natural and unprocessed, with a deep, instinctive empathy of rate health of the living world around her. Naturally — and here’s where the play starts getting into trouble — she has a buttoned-up, materialistic political candidate for a parent.

This is her mother, Smith (Kate Mulligan), a brilliant overachiever who prefers her own upscale digs, outfitted with tasteful appointments, to Romi’s disheveled residence, a tenement where Romi squats and which she has decorated in Contemporary Refuse.

It isn’t that Smith has no sense of romance; she has, after all, named her children after the places where they were conceived. (Lucky Romi got her start in the Holy City; her sister, not so fortunate, was conceived in Kansas. Her temperament matches her nomenclature.) Smith loves Romi, but is ill equipped to understand her; offered plate of “adopted” tomatoes, she shudders in revulsion, rejecting the very idea that she has a daughter “who eats from the garbage.” Smith finds it disgusting; more to the point, she fears it’s going to damage her election prospects.

That’s a sentiment echoed across the mediaverse, with pundits harping time and again on the “candidate’s daughter is eating from the garbage” meme. As Romi repeatedly attempts to explain, it’s more nuanced that that. Altogether too much perfectly good stuff — textiles and equipment as well as food — is relegated to the landfill for no other reason than that people are acquisitive and inattentive, and our status-driven, advertisement-saturated culture perpetually eggs them on. The resulting waste is enormous, but so are the opportunities to redirect the resource stream and make use of things that would otherwise go to rot without having been adequately used in the first place.

This is, of course, an affront to modern Western mores. The whole point of being a rich first-world nation is that we can afford to buy a new toy or item of clothing, use it lightly, grow bored, and toss it. The idea that whole nations could be fed and clad on nothing more than the contents of our waste bins is not exactly beside the point — it bolsters our collective self-esteem, after all — but it is also pathological. The problem is that as a society, we’re too sick and addicted to recognize it as such.

This is the play’s central message, and there’s no way to miss it: Ensler hammers us over the head with it endlessly, so much so that my theater date grumbled about having had to go to “church” by attending this play.

Still, there’s more going on than mere eco-preaching. Ensler takes sure and steady aim at a pantheon of frivolous concerns and disordered priorities. If Romi’s dietary strategy seems sure to turn voters off, her creativity as a fashion designer, coupled with an ecologically resonant message, proves hugely popular (and profitable). As long as no one has to think about actual garbage, edible or otherwise, repurposing and radical recycling seems chic and sophisticated. It’s all a matter of presenting the issue in a way that’s palatable: Clean, spotless, and generally elevated. Suddenly, wearing one of Romi’s “high trashion” creations is almost a moral imperative, thanks in part to the marketing savvy of her new boyfriend, an opportunistic young man named Damien (the too-aptly named Peter Porte) who quickly becomes one of Smith’s apparatchiks. (The other is daughter Kansas, played by Nicole Lowrance, who serves as Smith’s campaign director.)

The ghost of Herman Hesse whispers to us throughout the play, not only in the naming of Damien and name-check references to Hesse’s works, but also to the way in which Romi’s arc traces the same path as that of Hesse’s most famous creation, Siddhartha: From rags (stylish as they might be) to riches also entails a transition from peace of mind to constant mental and physical turmoil. Seduced by success and corrupted by designer labels, Romi suffers a complete collapse and threatens her mother’s political future with similar devastation. That’s how she ends up, in Act Two, in a mental ward, tagged with the clinical diagnosis of “O.C.P.” — Obsessive Political Correctness.

Ensler, the author of “The Vagina Monologues,” demonstrates a keen urge for satire, and Act Two expands the range of her legitimate targets beyond the frippery of high fashion and questionable “art” to the highly politicized (and deeply angering) problem of medical and psychiatric profiteering and warehousing. A disembodied, ever-present therapist who interacts with Romi and her family through a futuristic-looking two-way speaker summarizes, in one deft stroke, the mockable shortfalls of the medical profession. The therapist has no name, no face, and no readily apparent accountability; she speaks in bland generalities, but with supreme calm and self-assurance; hers is the authority of a being incapable of deeper reflection or empathy. Indeed, once in a while you have to wonder if she isn’t some sort of speaker-enabled software; she fails the Turing test in the exact same ways that your typical HMO doctor would, giving the sense that one is talking not to a person but rather to a set of pre-set choices on a menu of options.

That same sense of slightly artificial cobbling applies to the script. Ensler’s grasp of narrative and characterization isn’t deficient, but it’s not inspired, either. Her characters offer dimensionality only in ways that feel contrived; the people she’s created don’t surprise with the sorts of naturalistic, logical, and yet unpredictable zigs and zags that the plotting does. Most aggravating is the way Romi’s father Bruce (Michael T. Weiss) unremittingly serves as the voice of reason, taking Romi’s side and doing his best to convince Smith and Kansas that Romi’s well-being takes precedence over everything else. (He’s also the only one not so myopic as not to be utterly mystified as to why Romi is so concerned about the issue of wasting resources.)

That in itself qualifies as a major surprise: One wouldn’t think that a champion of women of Ensler’s stature would simply hand a patriarchal character the keys to the kingdom of rationality as though it were inevitably his place to possess them. Maybe this is one more satirical riff among many, but it’s played so straight that it doesn’t at all seem like Ensler is having us on with it. Rather it looks and sounds like Ensler is suggesting one of the oldest, tiredest, and most questionable of tropes: That it’s Father who knows best.

Still, even if Ensler doesn’t invest much depth or richness to the characters, she does offer gems of potent insight, and the production is top-notch. Shawn Sagady’s projection designs are integral to the play, not merely embellishments or distractions; Bradley King’s lighting design is well executed; director Pesha Rudnick manages to gloss over and shore up the script’s tonal changes and make everything seem organic and of a piece; and as to the sound design, I’m going to have to resort once more, given the lack of a program to scribble on, to noting it down here: Jane Shaw does award-worthy work. I could simply have listened to Shaw’s sound work and music all night… and given the show’s long running time, it almost seemed that I did. The sheer visual and audible zest of this production made it time well spent.

“O.P.C.” continues through Jan. 4, 2015, at the A.R.T.’s Loeb Drama Center, located at 64 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. For tickets and more information, please visit http://americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/opc

 

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