Theatre in Review: Girls in Trouble (The Flea Theatre)

	Laurel Holland in Girls in Trouble. Photo: Joan Marcus

Jonathan Reynolds is one of the theatre's few avowed conservatives -- David Mamet is only other one who comes to mind -- and, many years ago, in the blunt and frequently hilarious Stonewall Jackson's House, he made a decent argument to the effect that the American theatre is a monolithic institution devoted to the propagation of politically correct attitudes. In the case of Girls in Trouble, however, he is largely giving aid and comfort to the enemy, making his case in such ham-fisted fashion that the other side ends up looking far better than surely he intended.

Abortion is the topic of Girls in Trouble, which is structured as a triptych of interlinked episodes spanning five decades and ranging from wisecracking satire to bloodstained melodrama. In the first scene, it's the early '60s, and Hutch and Teddy, a couple of college kids, are in a car, driving through the night to take Barb, Hutch's sometime sex partner, to an abortionist. Hutch is a pretty hair-raising example of the Big Man on Campus as sociopath; while Barb, under the influence of multiple whiskey sours, is passed out in the back seat, Hutch describes, in near-pornographic detail, his romantic obsession with another young lady. (Hutch is also the son of the undersecretary of state in the Kennedy administration. It's not clear if this is an allusion to George Ball, Chester Bowles, or John Katzenbach, but it allows Reynolds the opportunity to relive John Kennedy's tomcatting ways with the likes of Angie Dickinson and Marlene Dietrich. It also sets off alarm bells that the author's real topic isn't abortion but liberalism in its entirety.)

When Barb awakens and becomes hysterical, Hutch calms her by taking her out of the car and having sex with her. (Teddy, watching from the car, masturbates himself to climax.) They finally arrive at the home of the abortionist, Sandra, a black woman with a seven-year-old daughter named Cindy. The procedure doesn't go well -- Hutch rushes it, because he wants to get Barb back to school in time for an exam the next morning -- and Barb nearly bleeds to death. The scene ends with Cindy casually strangling one of the family's kittens.

At this point, Reynolds appears to be taking a leaf from the Neil Labute playbook, offering a hysterical and sometimes gratuitous account of sex-crazed men dragging innocent young maidens into the gutter. The action takes a head-swiveling turn in the next section, set 15 or so years later, when Cindy, now named Sunshine, appears at a poetry slam to recount, in take-no-prisoners fashion, her sour affair with a man who used her sexually, only to go missing when she becomes pregnant. In a jagged monologue rife with earned rage, she puts forth with ruthless, and thoroughly discomfiting, logic, her plan to punish her ex-lover by having an abortion. Here, with a well-drawn character expressing all-too-recognizable feelings, he builds a scene that's powerful enough to shake you out of your comfortable preconceptions.

There's no time to dwell on this, however, because the action jumps ahead to today, where were meet Amanda, a celebrity chef on NPR who hosts a show called The Virtuous Vegan. (How do you have a cooking show on the radio, anyway?) In a plot hole big enough to accommodate Hutch's car, Amanda has just discovered that she is six months pregnant. The doctor hired to perform the abortion shows up at her Manhattan apartment for a consultation -- no, this isn't science fiction -- and is quickly revealed to be Cindy/Sunshine, now called Cynthia.

As it happens, Cynthia didn't have that abortion. Instead, she married the guy, found Jesus, had five more kids, and now devotes her life to talking women out of terminating their pregnancies. (She claims a 100% success rate; among her techniques, she chases woman into abortion clinics, impersonating a fetus, saying things like "Mommy, don't kill me.") Cynthia first produces a pair of dead ptarmigans and chops off their heads; Amanda, the vegan, shudders in horror, giving you an idea of what passes for irony in Reynolds' world. Then, for reasons I couldn't explain under threat of waterboarding, Cynthia strips off all her clothes and prowls around the apartment naked.

What follows is a shrill, screechy debate reminiscent of the battling talking heads on shows like The Situation Room and The O'Reilly Factor. Cynthia isn't totally pro-life; for example, she cops to being pro-capital punishment -- but, she says, that's all right, because the criminals have been proven guilty in court. (Tell that to the staff of the Innocence Project.) She claims that a pregnancy is only a temporary inconvenience, neatly overlooking the fact that once you have a child, it tends to stick around for a couple of decades. She even tries convincing Amanda that an abortion will give her cancer.

Finally, in a sequence that qualifies Girls in Trouble as the Reefer Madness of abortion dramas, Cynthia -- spoiler alert! -- drugs Amanda, and, armed with a couple of sterilized kitchen knives, performs a C-section on her. Kit, Amanda's seven-year-old daughter, shows up for the finale of the operation, as Cynthia, up to her elbows in blood, hands over a pair of tiny babies to the little girl.

It's at this point that it began to occur to me that Girls in Trouble might actually be a pro-abortion tract. No doubt the author is claiming Swiftian license, but, in any event, his method backfires. No one seriously interested in engaging an audience in a moral discussion of the subject would use such cardboard characters mouthing such predigested attitudes. Then again, it appears that Reynolds sees himself as a foot soldier in the struggle against liberal tyranny. That's why he has Cynthia comment that "most progressives are really regressive." It also accounts for the reference to NPR as "National Pussy Radio," as well as her tirade against "sensitive men." And it gives her room to denounce lesbians as immoral, presumably because they don't procreate.

Jim Simpson stages the first two sequences with a certain amount of verve, but he can't do a thing with the final screamfest. The cast is all over the place: Andy Gershenzon gives Hutch a certain creepy vitality, and Eboni Booth makes Sunshine's poetry slam into an attention-getting event. At other times, the actors mug ferociously. Laurel Holland gets some mileage out of Amanda's bitter remarks. John McDermott's rendering of Amanda's well-stocked kitchen is quite convincing, but Zack Tinkleman's bluntly executed lighting cues, designed to let Cynthia and Amanda confide to the audience, are extremely distracting. Amanda Bujak's costumes helpfully suggest each scene's time frame, and the Jeremy Wilson's sound design punctuates the first scene with a number of highly effective automotive effects.

Actually, if it does nothing else, Girls in Trouble is a reminder that democracy is a remarkable thing. Only in a culture determined to give equal time to all points of view would a piece of writing as ill-conceived and immature as this get produced by an important Off Broadway company.--David Barbour