Theatre in Review: The Wasp (Little Engine Theater)/The Lucky Ones (Boomerang Theatre Company) Fraught female relationships are the theme of the week, with two different plays focusing on connections that are, to put it mildly, freighted with considerable baggage. In each case, the situations have life-or-death implications. Time was when a trip to the theatre downtown meant an avant-garde experience. To see The Wasp, you must wend your way to Beaver Street (thank you, Google Maps) and climb five flights of a nondescript building, where you find an example of the twist-happy thrillers that, trying to ape the success of Deathtrap, regularly came and went on Broadway in the 1970s. Sometimes they do make them like they used to. Set in the UK, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's 2015 drama begins with the reunion of Heather and Carla, former classmates now in their late thirties. Since they are clearly of different classes and share more enmity than friendship -- Carla and her set regularly subjected Heather to the mean-girls treatment -- an awkward time is guaranteed. Indeed, Carla -- poor, sick of her aging husband, and pregnant with her fifth child -- wonders, sullenly, what the posh, artificially cheerful Heather wants from her. When Heather jumps right in, nervously detailing her fruitless attempts at getting pregnant, Carla, breaking the tension, half-jokingly offers to be a surrogate. But Heather has other plans: She wants her husband, Simon, dead, and she offers Carla 50,000 pounds to do the deed. You may be wondering why Heather, who appears to be in deadly earnest, believes that her former teen tormentor, about two months out from her water breaking, is the woman for this job. Carla would like to know the answer, too. It seemingly lies in Heather's memory, from their school days, of Carla killing and dismembering a pigeon. (She was having a bad day.) Carla is the first to point out that this hardly amounts to a qualification, but that money looks mighty tempting... Carla should take care: Heather has another agenda, which only gradually gets revealed as The Wasp skids through one wild reversal after another. You won't get another thing out of me, but get ready for plenty of screaming, brandished knives, a hostage situation, and a bombshell revelation about Carla's latest pregnancy. This sort of flagrantly unbelievable plotting can be fun if nobody takes it too seriously. But Malcolm has plenty to say about bullying, sexual assault, and society's increasing appetite for violence, and, in this context, her speechmaking is jarringly out of place. The Wasp wants to provide cogent social commentary and trashy thriller shocks. It's nice work if you can get it. This is nothing against Colby Minifie, as Heather, and Amy Forsyth, as Carla, both of whom give remarkably committed performances, almost (but not quite) convincing one that The Wasp has anything to do with real life. (The denouement is lifted directly from Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth.) Minifie, sheathing her rage in a cloak of smiles, is especially striking when recalling the worst day of her school career; Forsyth pushes back powerfully, recounting her own horrendous upbringing and making clear, in no uncertain terms, that she is not the author of Heather's sorrows. If nothing else, The Wasp gives them the chance to exercise their very real talents. Rory McGregor's production, which works hard to give the action a patina of plausibility, is supported by some surprisingly big design names. Working on a constrained budget, however, the results are iffy. Scott Pask's living room setting, with retro furniture and depressing dark green floral wallpaper, feels seedy rather than chic. Stacey Derosier's low-wattage lighting, which relies heavily on tiny LED bars overhead, does little to highlight the actresses' faces. Rather better are Rodrigo Munoz's costumes, which highlight the class differences between the women, and Brian Hickey's sound design, which includes some solid music choices and a well-executed effect connected to the final surprise. The Wasp is a product of Little Engine Theater, an intrepid troupe; its previous production, Cold Water had plenty going for it. This one may not justify the trip to Beaver Street. Meanwhile, farther uptown at Boomerang Theatre Company, The Lucky Ones erupts in a moment of bracing honesty that, late in the evening, briefly brings Lia Romeo's erratic play into sharp focus. Romero zooms in on Vanessa, a professional actress with a footloose attachment to everything but her career. Parties, booze, and men are amiable distractions, and trash television is her big addiction. Diagnosed with stage four cancer, she is gratingly cheerful, cultivating an upbeat attitude, planning a "cancer blog," and seeing if she can land a book deal. Vanessa's rock in life is Janie, who gave up acting, married, then divorced, and now teaches middle-school drama. Lacking Vanessa's determination and glamour and plagued by terrible self-doubts, she has opted out of the dating scene. All this makes her a perfect foil for Vanessa, who decides to get Janie off the shelf once and for all. (After all, she needs a project.) She gets Janie photographed and edits her bios on various apps, giving her a more provocative persona than honesty should allow. Soon, Janie is dating, then mourning, a nice botanist who seduces and abandons her. Furious to find herself in the romantic turmoil she once swore off, she gets an icy response from Vanessa, whose prognosis is looking bleaker by the day. Suddenly, years of buried resentments come out: Denouncing Vanessa as self-centered, Janie snaps, "It's not my fault that you're sick and I'm not!" Vanessa agrees, adding furiously that if anyone were to have a long, healthy life, "It should have been me! I would have been better at it." Thus, in a single line, The Lucky Ones becomes a closely observed look at a friendship that isn't really a friendship, based as it is on Vanessa's innate sense of superiority and Janie's also-ran status in life and love. Next up is a comic sketch in which Vanessa imagines herself as a guest on a radio show where the shock jock contacts female callers' old boyfriends, castigating them for their sins. In this case, the DJ calls up the Universe, seeking to find out why he has ghosted Vanessa. The idea of the Universe as a bad boyfriend is inventive -- who hasn't felt like that? -- especially when given a weaselly voice by Christian Borle. ("I'm just not really in a place to...keep things going with you right now," he murmurs guiltily, like every loser who ever dumped a good woman.) These two scenes make Romeo a writer to watch. Overall, however, The Lucky Ones is a scattered series of scenes that swap out tones and points of view with dizzying regularity. The opening, featuring Vanessa's diagnosis, is, irritatingly, played for farce, climaxing with her standing on the doctor's desk and helping herself to a cigarette. Her can-do approach to grave illness quickly wears thin. During chemo, she notes, "I'm just sitting here getting infused," adding, "It sounds like I'm some kind of vodka. Is that funny? Should I write that down?" Really, I wouldn't bother. Choosing to hide her illness from her friends, she says, "If I died. If I ghosted them because I actually was a ghost. Should I write that one down?" No need to put pen to paper, dear. The play's shaky structure, veering between romantic comedy, satirical fantasy, and stark confrontations, barely holds together. Janie's botanical romance goes nowhere, she is allowed to marinate in self-hatred to a suffocating degree, and a climactic flashback brings the play to an unresolved, unsatisfying ending. Without the solid, committed work of Purva Bedi (Vanessa) and Danielle Skraastad (Janie), one might want to ghost them, too. The director, Katie Birenboim, can't wrangle a sensible throughline from these doings, but keeps the action moving at a sensible pace; besides Bedi and Skraastad, she gets good work from David Carl as various woeful examples of masculinity. She has also assembled a solid design team. Ant Ma's uncluttered set has an attractive pop art quality -- check out the pink IV drip -- and it quickly adapts to a variety of locations. Jeff Croiter's lighting helps out by using colors, patterns, and varying angles to reshape the stage. Stefanie Genda's costumes reveal plenty about how Vanessa and Janie see themselves. Brandon Bulls' sound design includes such effects as subway cars, New Age music, school bells, Borle's contribution, and Brandi Carlile singing "The Story." The Lucky Ones is less effective than Romeo's previous effort, Still, which dealt with autumnal romance and political polarization, but, as a cancer survivor, she knows whereof she writes. The play has flashes of her talent, and the Vanessa-Janie relationship seems based in the real world. These days, that seems like a lot. --David Barbour 
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