Performance

PINCH, PINCH, PINCH

Rebecca SchoenkopfWed. January 16
 

A ladylike solution to the irritatingly enjoyable ‘A Feminine Ending’

From the very first sentence of A Feminine Ending at South Coast Repertory, I wanted to sneak behind the lead, Brooke Bloom (last seen as Ophelia in SCR’s magnificent Hamlet), and give her a hard, nasty pinch on the back of the arm, right where it hurts really bad.
Is that wrong?

Bloom plays a “composer” (it’s never a banker with these people) who’s two years younger than the playwright, Sarah Treem, and coincidentally is going through just the exact same things, with her parents splitting up and her “rock star” (Treem’s was an actor) boyfriend about to hit it huge. I think without Bloom in the starring role, I might have liked A Feminine Ending very much—the old people in the audience certainly did. Then again, old people like everything.

Treem, in her overweeningly autobiographical play, defames herself, as any self-respecting woman would—if only to show us how vain she isn’t—but Bloom plays the hostile, self-absorbed bitch straight, unleavened with wit or humor. Imagine Hillary Clinton saying, as she did in the New Hampshire debate when asked about her likeability, “It hurts my feelings, but I’ll try to go on,” and imagine her saying it without the half-smile or the joking depiction of a wilting debutante. Imagine her saying it and meaning it, sad-eyed and wan and really actually quite sorry for herself, and you have Bloom. Also, she eee-nun-cee-ates in a horribly mannered manner for a solid 95 minutes, as if she’s speaking around an orthodontic retainer. Pinch, pinch, PINCH!

There are nice themes winding around A Feminine Ending, about binaries and harmonies and opposites, and about the feminine in composition and language. (“I’m done,” says her stoner irono-awesome mailman ex-boyfriend, a very wry and charming Jedadiah Schultz, after a bit on Virginia Woolf and linguistics that may be a bit too Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern in its attempted erudition but gets the point across nonetheless. “I just told you everything I learned in college.”)

There’s lots of good Feminism 101 from her mother, played by Amy Aquino, who is quickly recognizable in a “Wait, who is that?” way; her resume lists hilarious stints on your better pay-cable shows, like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Weeds. She could easily have played the monstrously pushy mother as a grim, histrionic Medea. But here’s where it gets interesting: SHE DOESN’T.

At one point, my escort for the evening said the reason I didn’t like the play or its heroine was the residual similarities to my own (apparently horrible) personality. That is a slander. Are women held to awful double standards in our careers, and do I bitch about it frequently? Of course: See Chris Matthews actually pinching the cheek of Hillary Clinton, who I will remind you is a 60-year-old United States senator running for president.

But as an upwardly mobile artist in America, it’s unbecoming to whine about how hard you got it. To have your suit heard in court, you have to show that you’ve been damaged: A dream you had where Mozart came to your party and asked to be introduced to all your male classmates while you were just the hostess really just doesn’t cut it.

As our hero’s father says at one point: “Get some perspective. Thirty percent of Africa is dying of AIDS.” That’s right. Please shut the fuck up.

A FEMININE ENDING SOUTH COAST REPERTORY | 655 TOWN CENTER DR | COSTA MESA 92628 | 714.708.5555 | SCR.ORG  TUES-SAT 7:45PM; SUN 2 & 7:45PM | THROUGH JAN 27

Tags: , , ,

Viewing 4 Comments

 
close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus
 

© 2007-2008 Seven Days Publishing LLC.