Beauty on the Vine
Lauren Chickering is a woman so lovely and charismatic that when she was in high school, two of her less captivating classmates hired a plastic surgeon to make over their faces in her image. As an adult, Lauren becomes a right-wing radio host, supremely successful and highly influential with teenage girls because she is pretty (an important quality in radio) and because she says the sort of awful, pop-Nietzschean things that are, at least in this play, so popular with today’s youth.
Eventually, Lauren is gunned down. We suspect at first that her killer is a fan, enraged perhaps by Lauren’s marriage to a multiracial bleeding heart (who also happens to be the play’s mealy-mouthed narrator). The widower’s encounter with one of Lauren’s surgically enhanced doppelgängers raises hopes of a reenactment of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but then we realize, no, it’s just a setup for the revelation of Lauren’s real killer.
You’d think a story this far-fetched would be told with some acknowledgement of its soap-operatic absurdity, but playwright Berkman is dead serious. We’re meant to walk away thinking about celebrity and individuality and how girls are forced to forsake exceptionality for conformity, but mostly you’re just struck by how little on stage resembles the world we live in. Director Kae coaxes a game performance from lead actress Barrie, but it’s a disappointing start to BackStage’s ninth season, especially considering the successes of its eighth (How I Learned to Drive, Waiting for Lefty, Bloody Bess).
