In John Fisher's 2000 farce entitled Barebacking: A Sex Panic Comedy, a ghastly but riotously crude moment near the end of Act I included a sound-specific enactment of rimming on a darkened stage. After a strange wet plop was heard, the rimmer stood up, revealing a sudden and acute case of "brown face." When the two actors ran offstage and the lights came back up, there was no way for the audience to ignore the wet pile of "stage shit" lying on the floor. In the ensuing chase scene, actors had to keep running from one side of the stage to the other without stepping or sliding in Fisher's fecal fantasy puddle. Though not seen widely outside of San Francisco, that scene was a true coup de théâtre.
San Francisco Playhouse recently kicked off its 2019-2020 season with the West Coast premiere of Clare Barron's 2018 drama entitled Dance Nation. In his pre-show welcoming speech, artistic director Bill English stressed that this is one of the most edgy and surprisingly dangerous plays his company has produced. In his program note, he explained that:
"On the surface, Dance Nation is the story of a dance troupe of 13-year-old girls preparing for an upcoming competition. But true to form, Clare finds danger lurking behind the daily rehearsal routine. It is the terrifying power of puberty as these girls’ bodies explode into women, throwing them into worlds they can’t imagine. Most of us swear we’d rather die than go through those years again, and Dance Nation is likely to confirm that instinct as it throws us into the nightmare of adolescence with all of its trauma, catastrophic change and uncertainty."
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| Ash Malloy, Julia Brothers, Indiia Wilmott, Lauren Spencer, Bryan Munar, Krystle Piamonte, and Mohana Rajagopal in a scene from Dance Nation (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
"To engage our empathy for these pre-teens whose story is so rarely told and to awaken in us the terrors of that age might seem more than enough, but Ms. Barron does not stop there. She tweaks our perceptions by asking directors to cast women of all ages to play these young girls: women from their 60s, 50s, 40s, and 30s. This device allows us to experience our young dancers through the eyes and bodies of the women they will become, just as the actors must encounter the girls they once were. The world of the play, like the psychic landscape of these children, is also chaotic and cannot be crammed into the confines of linear storytelling. Instead, we hurtle, lurch, and rampage along with our dancers through their nightmare world where time seems irrelevant."
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| Krystle Piamonte (Zuzu), Mohana Rajagopal (Connie), Lauren Spencer (Ashlee), and Liam Robertson (Dance Teacher Pat) in a scene from Dance Nation (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
A new wave of dramas written by female playwrights focusing on what young women experience during their stressful teenage years is challenging audiences with roiling emotions, biological issues, and identity crises that examine sisterhood on a theatrical landscape marked by splotches of menstrual blood. While many critics compare Dance Nation to Sarah DeLappe's 2016 play, The Wolves, I might liken it to Dry Land, a more intensely focused play about women in sports by Ruby Rae Spiegel that received a truly challenging production from Shotgun Players in 2018 that included a grotesque amount of stage blood which had to be mopped up by the school's janitor.
Without doubt, Dance Nation is the most gimmicky of the three. The play begins with a dancer stumbling as she finishes a routine, landing on the floor in severe pain and discovering that she cannot get up. The same actor (Michelle Talgarow) reappears throughout the play as various mothers of the young dancers who soon take over the story. In some scenes, blood seems to flow from the girls' mouths as they vent their near vampiric lust; in other scenes their legs and clothes are stained with blood from their period. In a quiet moment late in the play, Zuzu (Krystle Piamante) naively tells the lone male dancer, Luke (Bryan Munar), how she plans to lose her virginity.
Attempting to train these youngsters from Liverpool, Ohio is "Dance Teacher Pat" (Liam Robertson), who spouts all the tired clichés and coaching advice familiar from high school sports. The playwright has explained that she "was tired of the casting convention of hiring petite 25-year-olds to play 13." However, the physicality of individual actors can easily confuse audiences that do not quickly grasp why women representing such a large range of ages and body types are pretending to be teenagers
Though Barron's play contains some breathtaking monologues, it frequently loses the audience's sympathy as it skips from one vignette to another.
As Amina, Indiia Wilmott realizes later in life that believing so strongly in one's talent sometimes means that a person ends up going through life alone.
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| Indiia Wilmott (Amina) and Ash Malloy (Sophia) in a scene from Dance Nation (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
As Maeve, the gifted Julia Brothers describes her youthful flights of fancy with a sense of childlike wonder (shared by boys and girls alike) while sporting a cowlick that invokes images of Dennis the Menace. In one touching moment as a young girl who aspires to become an astrophysicist, her jaw drops and her eyes widen until she almost seems to morph into the ghost of Stan Laurel.
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| Michelle Talgarow (Zuzu's mom) and Krystle Piamonte (Zuzu) in a scene from Dance Nation (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
Zuzu is emblematic of the child who knows that she is not as talented as her doggedly supportive mother would like her to believe. Her supposedly best friend, Amina (who is confident in her competitiveness) takes Zuzu's brutal social rejection in stride. Lauren Spencer claims the stage as the angry, insecure, and voluptuous Ashlee who declares that:
"I’m going to make you my bitch, you motherfucking cunt-munching piece of shit prick. I am your god. I am your second coming. I am your mother and I’m smarter than you and more attractive than you and better than you at everything that you love and you’re going to get down on your knees and worship my mind, my mind and my body, and I’m gonna be the motherfucking KING of your motherfucking WORLD... WE’RE GONNA MAKE THEM EAT THEIR DICKS AND DIE!”
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| Lauren Spencer simmers with rage as Ashlee in Dance Nation (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
Near the end of Barron's one-act play, the members of San Francisco Playhouse's ensemble (including Luke and Dance Teacher Pat) keep repeating a mantra which stresses how much their pussy is the source of their power. This "pussy galore" moment will, no doubt, be heard differently by various members of the audience.
- Young women may take strength from hearing these words spoken with such freedom and conviction.
- Older women might wish they had could have felt such strength from a single word during their adolescence.
- Heterosexual men who suddenly realize how clueless they were about what their female classmates were experiencing may quietly cringe or begin to worry about the secret lives of their daughters.
- BDSM enthusiasts with a pegging fetish (as well as gay men who frequently incorporate such terms as "mussy" and "man-pussy" into their sexual banter) might snicker with a newfound appreciation for the lexicon of the leather subculture -- or feel empowered to talk more proudly about bottoming while referring to their assholes as their pussies.
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| Bryan Munar (Luke) and Michelle Talgarow (his mother) in a scene from Dance Nation (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
Though director Becca Wolff and choreographer Kimberly Richards guide their actors through the angst of adolescence (as well as the confusion of trying to master a new dance piece created by Dance Teacher Pat as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi), the results feel disjointed and tepid, at best. Angrette McCloskey's set design makes good use of San Francisco Playhouse's turntable, while Melissa Trn's costumes, Wen-Ling Liao's lighting, and Theodore J. H. Hulsker's sound design attempt to keep the momentum building. Julia Brothers, Krystle Piamonte, Lauren Spencer, and Michelle Talgarow turn in strong performances. I wish I could have been equally impressed by Liam Robertson and Indiia Willmott.
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| Michelle Talgarow and Liam Robertson in a scene from Dance Nation (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
Performances of Dance Nation continue through November 9 at the San Francisco Playhouse (click here for tickets).
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