"On the Road Again"
Instead of all those annoying titles that think it clever to
use only lower case letters, most recently runboyrun, Catya
McMullen’s GEORGIA MERTCHING IS DEAD insists on using all caps. The play
itself is sometimes loud—to the point of yelling—but it definitely doesn’t call
for headlines.
The few critics who’ve commented on it thus far have had more or
less positive reactions, but I found myself unmoved, incredulous (to use an au
courant word), bored even, and—apart from a few good zingers—unable to find it
as amusing as did many others in the audience.
 |
| Diana Oh, Layla Khoshnoudi, Claire Siebers. All photos: Jeremy Daniel. |
Their car belongs to Emma (Claire Siebers, intense), an
unmarried, successful, sexually overactive, emotionally insecure writer with
mom issues. She shares the driving with Whitney (Layla Khosnoudi, quirky), a
lesbian, also unsure of herself, who’s just quit her job as a chef, and is
weird enough to have built a urination device for Gretchen. Gretchen (Diana Oh,
expansive), in the back seat, is the married, potty-mouthed mother of a kid
with a butt fixation. She looks like she’s about to pop any minute, her belly
so big she could be the next octomom.
 |
| Layla Khoshnoudi, Diana Oh, Claire Siebers. |
As the narratively flat drive down South proceeds, the
women share a yada-yada barrage of remembered love affairs, sexual encounters,
and other personal detritus. Much of what humor there is either childishly scatological
or naughtily erotic, like “Who’s the oldest person you’d have sex with?” (Even Gretchen’s
husband’s texts are preoccupied with sex and poop.)
 |
| JD Taylor, Diana Oh. |
Over the course of 90
minutes, there’s also a lot of thematic chatter about friendships versus family
and marriage. Various clichéd experiences bring the friends together, tear them
apart, and bond them together again, more closely than before.
 |
| Layla Khoshnoudi, Diana Oh, Claire Siebers. |
Gretchen and her husband, Jeremy (JD Taylor), who live in Brooklyn’s
Park Slope, need the time to look at a Connecticut house they may be buying. Jeremy
insists she not go to the funeral in her condition but she defies him, a decision
that may have some momentary dramatic merit but, as anyone with a half a brain
knows, is senseless from a practical perspective. Sure enough, the play
proceeds to demonstrate this, albeit unsatisfactorily.
 |
| Layla Khoshnoudi. |
Credulity is thus strained along with any sympathy for
Gretchen, whose behavior otherwise doesn’t go a long way to making us admire
her. Given to descriptive dialogue about female parts and hemorrhoids, she unconvincingly
turns eloquently contemplative when delivering Georgia’s eulogy. There are
multiple other such moments, as when Whitney, having stopped off at a trailer
park she once lived in, talks to a tree.
 |
| Diana Oh. |
Mack truck-like contrivances keep coming down the road, like
Emma’s reuniting in North Carolina with a handsome ex, a filmmaker named Harlan
(Quincy Dunn-Baker), the pretentious kind who can’t bear when Emma says “movie”
instead of “film.” When, standing in a graveyard, the couple let old tensions
flame into hormone-stimulating anger, you know exactly where this train is
headed.
 |
| Quincy Dunn-Baker, Claire Siebers. |
And the scenes, inevitably, when car troubles appear on the
road back home, only confirm what you’ve been expecting all along. Whatever incredulity
you’ve been feeling here rises to the plane of exasperation.
Alexis Distler’s multipurpose set, efficiently lit by Cat
Tate Starmer, encompasses both interiors and exteriors, consisting of dark-toned
walls that allow props or wall hangings to identify specific locales. Since much
of the action takes place on the road, there’s a central section that opens to
reveal two rows of car seats, backed by the unchanging image of a rural
highway.
 |
| Claire Siebers, Diana Oh, Layla Khoshnoudi. |
Giovanna Sardelli (Finks, one of my fondest EST
memories) provides crisp staging, at one point introducing a clever sequence
of film-like jump cuts, with blackouts and rock music helping to move quickly from
one tableau to another. She hasn’t found a way, though, to deal technically with
a prop car lacking seatbelts or to cover for why Gretchen has to go through all
sorts of contortions squeezing her baby boulder into the rear seat, as if cars
with movable front ones for just such situations hadn’t been invented.
GEORGIA MERTCHING IS DEAD isn’t as far gone as the
person in its title, but it survives more because of infusions from its able
cast than from the nutrients in its dramatic bloodstream.
Ensemble Studio Theatre
545 W. 52nd St., NYC
Through October 27
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