Kirsten Potter and Jeffrey Frace in Rapture, Blister, Burn at ACT Theatre (Photo: John Cornicello)
The female WASP and her marital and gender-oriented struggles are the grist that is ground in ACT’s production of Rapture, Blister, Burn (through August 11, tickets). Playwright Gina Gionfriddo has enough self-awareness to have her characters name their demographic, but the problems of the privileged are as familiar as they are suspect. These are the issues that get talked about in the news, after all. (In fact, this ACT production feels especially timely given the ongoing discussion inspired by Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic Monthly article — which came out just a few weeks after the show’s Off-Broadway premiere last summer.)
Age and gender may define your interest in Rapture, Blister, Burn. ACT’s core theatre-going audience (older, wealthier, white women) will likely find enlightening perspectives and hilarity. For audiences under 40, the anxieties of balancing goals of family and career may hit too close to home for comfort — while its analysis of feminism will be either an interesting primer or a retread of the familiar. Even between that anxiety and retread there are plenty of solid laughs.
Those laughs arrive despite a dearth of surprise following the initial establishing scenes. Catherine (Kirsten Potter), an academic career woman, returns home to take care of her mother and to question what might have been with her old grad-school boyfriend, Don (Jeffrey Fracé), and his stay-at-home wife. As Catherine wrestles with her desire to have it all, her charmingly unconventional mother and a wise fool of a young student offer generational context. Theories of feminism are expounded in a contrived academic setting. It feels like a continuation on the Wasserstein oeuvre, minus the Jewish perspective.
This is not a bad thing, per se; the update was long overdue — though one wonders what it might look like in a less privileged setting. When a character in this play speaks of having no money, one suspects she’s not on line at the food pantry. Perhaps the drama of scraping by would put gender roles in a more revealing light.
While Rapture, Blister, Burn doesn’t declare it has definitive answers to its questions, it is nonetheless reassuringly conservative, barely nudging the status quo.
The man of this play is an underachieving archetype, a Homer Simpson of college administration. The women talk about men but they’re not really interested in them as people, only in relation to their own self-serving goals. Of course, this is too often the lot of female characters on the stage and the choice may be knowing. Here too Gionfriddo reveals her self-awareness as Don tells his wife that she’s treating him like a pair of shoes.
Gionfriddo’s script walks a fine line between creating characters that are little more than issues, and dealing with issues that do little more than serve the characters. She pulls off the trick without a hitch. While it’s not the most integrated sort of storytelling, the only awkward consequence is a feeling that one may be quizzed on feminism at curtain call.
The familiar cast of Seattle stalwarts delivers the material professionally. At a recent performance, most pushed heavily into artifice in their early scenes but relaxed over the course of the play. The exception was Potter who was on her game from first to last. However, Potter doesn’t achieve much chemistry with Fracé. In fact the only glimmer of real warmth in this cast is between Potter and Priscilla Lauris, in the role of Catherine’s mother, Alice. Mariel Neto is strong as the pre-med dropout while Kathryn Van Meter overdoes the stay-at-home-mom’s controlled façade.
The Allen Theatre’s arena staging is both challenging and rewarding. Anita Montgomery’s cast started out shouting a bit, but eventually overcame the difficulty of projecting to audience on all sides. That shouting disrupts the extraordinary potential for intimacy afforded by performing in the round, but it soon passes.
Matthew Smucker’s set is simple, complete, and goes a long way to restoring the intimacy of the staging. Pete Rush’s costumes are smart, ranging from cinched-up frumpiness to louche political statement, and his footwear choices speak volumes. L.B. Morse gets some standout moments with the lighting. The finest of these is the transition out of pre-show so be sure to find your seat and silence your cell phone early in order to catch it.
