“Just a Five Towns
Girl”
L.O.V.E.R., originally produced in Croton Falls, NY,
and then in Los Angeles, is a middling, sexually-oriented memoir cum one-woman play
by and starring actress Lois Robbins. Seen locally last year at the United Solo festival, it's now playing at the Pershing Square
Signature Center.
Since I confess my previous unfamiliarity with her, I assume
the same is true of many who might wonder, what’s Lois Robbins to us or we to
her that we should care for her?
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| Lois Robbins. All photos: Joan Marcus. |
Lois Robbins is an attractive, youthful-looking woman at
around the mid-century mark, with the svelte dancer’s physique of someone half
her age. She takes pleasure in displaying it when the script allows her to remove
her long, clinging sheath—worn with sneakers—so she can prance about in pale
pastel tights.
Robbins has had a reasonably substantial career in all the
entertainment media. You can watch clips of her film work here on IMBD, beginning with one
showing her opposite British heartthrob Jonathan Rhys Meyers in The Aspern
Papers, an indie also starring Vanessa Redgrave. Her principal claim to
fame seems to be her work on various daytime TV soaps.
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| Lois Robbins. |
More to the point, she’s from a Jewish family in the Five
Towns section of Long Island (where my own daughter raised her family). It’s a
geographical origin (near JFK) she finds slightly embarrassing although she’s
clearly proud of her ethnicity, insisting she can play “Jewish” despite never
getting cast as such. Although her script, which is more in the “then-I-laid”
than the “then-I-acted” vein, doesn’t cite particular movie. TV, or theatre work,
she constantly refers back to her upbringing, including her demanding father’s
snide remarks and her mother’s pearls of parental wisdom.
This background, and her New York-area personality, should
make her story that much more immediate to a local audience. Indeed, the
vast majority of those around me were middle-aged women, clearly
her target audience, who seemed to appreciate the shifting focuses of her self-deprecating
tale of self-gratification, evolution from ugly duckling to "stunning" (as an admirer says), sexual development, search for love in all the wrong
men, theatrical ambitions, marriage, parenting, and health issues.
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| Lois Robbins. |
I say “self-gratification” because the play begins with Robbins
sprawled across a washing machine as she tells us that she had her first orgasm
at age three. She proceeds to explain how, as she grew up, she couldn’t resist “the
feeling” she got from direct contact with the soft and hard parts of her furniture,
as well as the vibrations of her washing machine.
Her detailed account of her masturbation mastery suggests we’re
in for an autobiographical Fifty Shades of Grey but, alas (or amen), her
story largely drops the radically risqué to concentrate on her more
conventional romantic and sexual experiences (including her rejection of a
threesome) as she simultaneously pursued her career in New York and the West Coast. None of the men or things she does with them are particularly unusual, though, and, much as they may seem unique to her, sound relatively common in our sexually liberal times.
Finally, Robbins found Mr. Right in the shape of the spouse she calls (like everyone else she mentions) by a pseudonym, Arthur, despite his being the enormously wealthy Andrew Zaro, a fact she neglects to convey. Robbins's survival from a serious--if, tragically, all too familiar--health scare and the raising of her own kids fill out (or bloat, depending on your perspective) the narrative,.
Fewer topics and more of the outrageousness promised at the
start might have salvaged the piece. A successful, recent example of such an
approach would be Jacquelin
Novak: Get on Your Knees, a one-woman show preoccupied with
relationship issues in the context of the actress’s obsession with fellatio.
It’s also hard not to see in Robbins’s relationships (including an
actual “affair”) a tendency toward passivity and victimization, as if it were
always the men who were responsible, not only for making the initial connection
but for whatever difficulties ensued.
Director Karen Carpenter gussies up Robbins’s rather
unsurprising, disappointingly unfunny material by moving the lithe, physically
expressive performer up, down, and around Jo Winiarski’s skeletal set of a three-tiered
structure of steps and landings dressed with white sheeting, over which hang an
assortment of seven, small, glass lighting instruments. Jeannette Oi-Suk Yew’s
lighting is called on frequently to alter the mood from one sequence to another
(indicated by moving LED ribbons saying things like, “THE GIRL,” “THE TEENAGER,”
“THE WOMAN,” “THE PATIENT,” etc.). Jane Shaw’s expert sound design, with music,
crowd noises, and other effects, also contributes mightily.
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| Lois Robbins. |
Robbins is polished and pleasant, but (a few moments of
genuineness aside) she comes across more as an actress than the spontaneously
charming person she needs to be. Nor is she helped by material filled with commonplaces that aren’t enhanced by her occasional tendency to giggle, as if
that might make them seem wittier than they are.
At two points, Robbins provides different words to spell out
her acronymic title. I came up with my own but maybe it's best not to repeat it.
Pershing Square Signature Center/Alice
Griffith Jewel Box Theatre
480 W. 42nd St., NYC
Through November 2
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