“Ride On, Lady Jean Ladies, Ride
On!”
Oh my God,
you guys, like you’d really better get down to the Cell Theatre to see this new
play if you want to spend some time with some awesome cool girls who are like so
into horses their motto is “Boyz May Come and Boyz May Go But Horses R 4Ever”!
Jenny
Rachel Weiner’s amusing little black comedy, just this side of sketchdom, closed on December 19 but has now reopened
to run until January 23. It takes you into the hearts and souls of seven horse-loving
tweeners, exposing their prepubescent fixations and verbal and physical tics with
pinpoint accuracy. The plot goes a bit south in the last 15 minutes, but enough charm
has been stirred up by then to keep you engaged even when all credibility has flown.
If the piece ran any longer than its just-right 50 minutes, I’d have begun
itching to put my feet in the stirrups and gallop off down West 23rd Street.
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| From left: Olivia Macklin, Angeliea Stark. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
The setting is the girly-girly bedroom (well designed in the
tiny Cell space by Daniel Geggatt) of the wealthy Ashleigh (Olivia Macklin), 12-year-old
president of the Lady Jean Ladies, a suburban Florida club passionately devoted to the art of
equestrianism. Trophies, in the form of statuettes and ribbons, abound, since
Ash, whose family owns the adjoining Lady Jean stables, is a champion rider.
Ash, once fat but now a sleek blonde with carefully tended tresses that her
friends vie to have the privilege of French braiding, sits tall in the saddle,
dominating her friends with the carefully calibrated methods of a classic mean girl
manipulator.
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| From left: Anna Baryshnikov, Eleanore Codron, Olivia Macklin, Angeliea Stark. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
The
gathering, with its jealousies, hazing, and group rituals, reveals how the
girls jockey for favor and toady with power. As in the recent Punk Rock, when unsupervised young folk
get together in a play, Lord of the Flies
is never far behind. Making the
girls’ love for horses the thing that ties them together—horses, of course, can
be seen as a sublimation of prepubescent sexual desire on a level with whatever
pop singer young girls are obsessing over—allows playwright Weiner to set up a
situation that brings the girls’ frustrations to a boil. This happens when
Brandi, 20 minutes late for the meeting, bursts in with the horrible news that
the stable and its horses are being sold, with the animals to be turned into horse meat.
From this
point on the play’s heightened comic realism begins to merge with farcical surrealism.
It’s easy enough to buy the girl’s hilarious attempt to ask Ann Romney, whom
the girls revere as a patron saint, for help by trying to reach her through Michelle Obama at the White House,
but when an eruption of violence leaves the stage littered with—well, let’s
just say it’s not horse meat—you can be excused for thinking Horse Girls needs to be reined in. Still,
there’s a bizarre poignancy to the final moments as Ash, alone under a disco
ball with her hair blowing in the wind, struggles to sing Mariah Carey’s “Forever”
to a karaoke accompaniment.
Director Sarah
Krohn does a terrific job in creating an ensemble of enjoyably believable
maidens, all excellently played by actresses in their twenties. Each (aided by
the pitch-perfect costuming of Siena Zoë Allen), is clearly defined, with her
own quirks and habits; as expected, there’s a surfeit of declarative statements
ending in upward inflections. The girls’ phantasmagorical reaction to news of the
horse’s fate, done under strobe lights, is effective, but something similarly
stylized seems called for when the (rather pale) gore begins to flow.
Much as Horse Girls sometimes seems like
parodistic fluff, along the lines of an extended SNL bit, its strengths and weaknesses were enough to spark a lively
discussion with my guest as we sat on the subway afterward. That’s
what good, even if imperfect, theatre should always do. Ride on, Lady Jean
Ladies, ride on!
Cell Theatre
338 W. 23rd St., NYC
Through January 23
