38. THE MUSCLES IN OUR TOES
If you went to a New York high
school, chances are your 25th reunion was held in a catering hall, perhaps at a
nice hotel where people coming from out of town could reserve a room. In
Stephen Berber’s oddly titled THE MUSCLES IN OUR TOES, at the Labyrinth Theatre,
a high school class that graduated in 1989 is having its reunion but it’s in
the actual school itself, city not specified; this allows the playwright to set
his scene in the music room, where the chief characters, escaping the
festivities, randomly gather to work out their issues. The music from the
affair is heard dimly in the background and, when the door to the room opens, it
gets much louder (thanks to Jessica Paz’s good sound design), so we’re always aware
of the events going on offstage. Given the outrageous implausibility of Mr.
Berber’s plot and the cartoonish behavior of his characters, some audience
members may yearn to join the offstage party and leave this bunch of losers to
its own devices. Surely, something more believable and interesting must be
happening at the reunion proper, where one might wish to ponder: Is the class
beauty still hot? Has the star athlete turned to lard? Who’s become famous or
rich? Is anyone interested in hooking up? Do I regret not having kept in touch
with any of these people? And, of course, who’s married to whom, who’s divorced
from whom, and who’s come out of the closet?
There aren’t many plays about
reunions of one sort or another but the subject practically forms a subgenre of
movies. School reunions are the most common material, which brings to mind such
popular films as SOMETHING WILD, GROSSE POINTE BLANK, THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON
(which began as a Pulitzer Prize-winning play), ROMY AND MICHELE’S HIGH SCHOOL
REUNION, PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, and, of course, THE BIG CHILL. Anyone who’s
ever gone to a reunion, especially one taking place as long as 25 years after
graduation, recognizes the feelings of trepidation involved because they know
that while they’re judging others in terms of how well or poorly they’ve fared,
they themselves will be under everyone else’s microscope. Issues of pride, ego,
academic and personal rivalries, friendship, sexual experiences, and so on
will surface, and people will go home in different states of elation or
depression, not unlike the way they often react to seeing the lives of others
they haven’t seen in decades lived out in photos and status reports on
Facebook.
Some of this occurs in Mr.
Berber’s play, of course, when its protagonists wander into the music room
in search of one another. It starts with Les (Bill Dawes), a mustached fight
choreographer who keeps noting—as if it’s somehow more prestigious—that he now
works more in film than theatre, citing a movie in which his contribution was
to stage a fight scene in which a remote control was thrown. Les is videotaping
himself creating a message of hope for the wife of his high school buddy, Jim. We
learn more about this when another high school pal enters. This is Reg (Amir
Arison), a vaguely Middle Eastern-looking person, who says he’s of Persian
descent even though he also has a Jewish aunt in Afghanistan (?@!). Reg works
as an accountant for the federal government. Jim is a sneaker mogul with a
factory in Chad, where, it seems, he's been kidnapped by Chadian radicals
in retaliation for the detention in California by the FBI of a suspected
Chadian terrorist. Pretty soon, we begin to realize that these characters may
seem reasonably mature men in their early 40s, but that they’re not really
playing with full decks. The same will be true of all the other characters. On
the surface they seem relatively successful and well adjusted, but underneath
they’re still the uptight, insecure kids they were two and a half decades
earlier.
Then we meet Phil (Mathew Maher), the one-year-younger brother
of Les and Reg’s classmate, Dante. Phil,
who’s openly gay and therefore considers himself an expert on all things homosexual,
gives the playwright numerous opportunities for gay-slanted bantering, most of
it silly and insignificant. A subtext of homoerotic preoccupations gradually
emerges but its ultimate purpose is vague. By now, as well, the air is heavy
with overheated vulgarities. As the plot heats up, gin and tonics are
continually washed down, but all the g and t’s in the world wouldn’t inspire
what these characters soon get up to. Nor would it elicit the occasional
outbursts of eloquence that emerge from the same mouths that use adolescent expressions
like “vagina farts.”
Soon, it’s Dante’s turn to enter.
A banker, he’s the most formally dressed, wearing a dark business suit and tie,
his black hair slicked down. Dante is an Italian-American who is converting to
Judaism and insists on his kids wearing yarmulkes even though they attend a
parochial school (presumably a Catholic one); why Dante himself isn’t wearing
one is a question for director Anne Kauffman and costume designer Emily Rebholz.
Dante, who’s wound tighter than a two-dollar watch, holds a grudge against Reg
for having had sex with his girlfriend, Carrie, in their senior year, in the
nurse’s room, without a condom, and from behind. This information is repeated
several times in the play, just in case we forget it. Pretty soon, Dante,
obviously fed up with his life (he’s going through custody proceedings), joins
the conversation about how the guys should respond to Jim’s abduction by taking
action. Reg's idea of starting a peace Website on Jim's behalf is unanimously rejected. So far, so good. A satire on everyday citizens with frustrated personal
lives seeking to do something meaningful, even risky, to save an old friend,
exaggerated as the circumstances may be.
What happens though is that the
discussion escalates until the idea of bombing the FBI arises, modified so that
only a file cabinet in the local FBI office is bombed. The point of the attack is to draw
attention to the FBI’s improper detention of the suspected Chadian terrorist. You see, he could in no way be guilty because Phil assures everyone he knows for a fact
that the guy is gay, with the kind of “typical” gay personality that would
never commit an act of terrorism. When asked how he himself could do be involved an act of anti-FBI violence, he declares: “I’m a different
breed, meaning I’m not your typical gay man.” Instead, he’s “a complex gay man as opposed, to, like James Franco.”
By now, all sense of
plausibility, believability, rationality, logic, or what have you has been
scuttled. The plan, however, is still on the table and a resolution is
required, so we’re forced to see how the playwright works his way out of the
situation and brings it back to reality. For one thing, he interrupts the
progress of the plot to introduce Carrie, the girl whose sexual encounter with
Reg still rankles Dante. Jeanine Serrales, sheathed in a tight, red dress, gives a sensationally over-the-top performance, as the drunk, promiscuous, and
potty mouthed Carrie, which gives us some relief from the idiocies of the male
characters. There's little reason for her presence but her scene steals the show.
After she leaves, and
the plot to bomb the FBI file cabinet on Jim’s behalf heats up again, guess who
shows up? Yes, it’s Jim. You see, he wasn’t really abducted at all, but merely
took three months off to marry a Chadian girl and go to live in her village and
learn the culture (German, too, while he was at it.) Jim, by the way, is
African-American, giving the play yet another touch of diversity:
Persian-American, Italian-American Catholic converting to Judaism, African-American,
gay, woman, guy with mustache—see what I mean? What happens subsequently is so farfetched,
I’ll reveal no more. You wouldn’t believe me anyway.
Despite my skepticism regarding
the plot, the written script has many moments that promise laughs, both because
of their often imaginative use of profanity and because they manage to capture
a kind of potentially laugh-worthy nasty sarcasm. But in performance, as
directed by Ms. Kauffman, they too often fall flat because the actors tend to
shout them when they’re not being simply thrown away. An example of the latter might
be when Dante attacks theatre by saying it’s “greatest cultural contribution is
fucking CATS” and Les answers, “We don’t
fuck cats!”
Most of the actors are familiar
Off Broadway faces, and they give their all, playing for realism instead of
farce, which is generally the best way to make farce work if the material is
innately funny. But whatever humor lies dormant in Mr. Belber’s text is hard to
laugh at when nothing you see before you is remotely convincing. The miscasting
of Mr. Maher, one of New York’s busiest thespians, is also unhelpful; for one thing, his
physical presence and way of speaking make Phil too quirky to be the guy we’re
told by Carrie is someone all the girls in high school wanted to have sex with.
The Labyrinth usually puts a lot
of effort into creating realistic sets, and Lee Savage’s design for THE MUSCLES
IN OUR TOES belongs at the top of the list for its fully realized replication
of a cinderblock-walled, high school music room, complete with several rows of
empty chairs. Japhy Weideman’s lighting, which uses a good deal of florescent
lighting, nevertheless finds effective ways to shape the space, and—apart from my
cavil about Dante’s not having a yarmulke—Ms. Rebholz’s costumes all suit
their wearers’ characters well, especially Carrie's sizzling, red dress..
THE MUSCLES IN OUR TOES gets its
title from a speech Dante delivers, one whose rhetoric seems out of keeping
with this uptight nutcase. In it he recalls Les having said
something about friendship that seems as far from the Les we’ve seen as Jupiter
is from Earth, although Les says he doesn’t remember saying it at all. Dante
says Les compared friendship to godliness, that “it is our way into the divine.
. . . And when we’re there, we’ll know because
our sense of loyalty will run deep like a river and our call to action, when the shit hits the fan, will hurtle us forward
with every particle of our body, from the tips of our brain to the muscles in
our toes.” Regardless of whether Les ever said it or Dante is making it up, that last clause perfectly expresses my incredulity, from my brains
to my toes, while watching this play.
