Theatre in Review: Cuddles (Brits Off Broadway/59E59)

	Renday Haywood, Carla Langey. Photo: Alex Beckett

The things one learns at the theatre: Having seen Cuddles, I now realize that, if you are getting serious about your boyfriend, don't bring him to the home where your vampire sister is locked in the attic. She'll only make scratching noises that you'll have to explain away. Don't you feel better for knowing that?

Joseph Wilde's gothic two-hander presents the most bizarre family of this young season. Tabby is a business executive with a soul of serrated steel; when we first meet her, she is dispensing with the employee who once sexually abused her. "I'm f---ing you this time. Take it like a man," she tells him. Her way of dealing with the unwanted attentions of a man who importunes her in a train station is to "grab them by their little twat-bib and you stamp your heel down onto their instep until you hear it crack." Notice the use of the plural pronoun: This is clearly Tabby's standard procedure for frustrating interested males.

As you may imagine, Tabby lives a largely solitary existence, and not just because of her unusual take on interpersonal relations. To the world, she lives alone; in reality, the attic of her house -- where she grew up -- is occupied by Eve, a teenager who dwells in squalor, wearing a filthy T-shirt and devouring books. (The Harry Potter series is a particular favorite.) If she is bad when Tabby visits her -- say, she mixes up which pail is intended for urination and which for defecation -- Eve may end up chained to the bed. If she is very, very good, she will be allowed to sink her teeth into Tabby's arm and drink her blood.

Eve's hermetically sealed world is governed by a set of ironclad rules (Rule 13: Never bite the neck. Rule 12: Don't cheat at Monopoly. Rule 10: Say nice things or say nothing at all.) She is terrified of leaving the attic and is convinced that sunlight will kill her. (Her one attempt at stepping out, dressed in a burqa-like outfit, is a disaster.) When not given blood to drink, she gets by on a variety of junk foods and jam sandwiches, which her leave her mouth stained a satisfyingly sanguinary red. When Eve behaves, she and Tabby enjoy something like intimacy; when she misbehaves, hysteria ensues, followed by terrible punishments. "Here be monsters," Tabby says more than once, fully aware that she is included in the tally.

If you can accept that, without arousing suspicion, Tabby has somehow gotten away with keeping Eve locked up for roughly 15 years, you stand a chance of enjoying Cuddles. Certainly, Carla Langley's Eve goes a long way toward lending a sense of psychological reality to this weird situation. This striking actress goes for the jugular, so to speak, creating a feral creature driven inexorably by her physical needs -- watch her hump a table leg in innocent sexual pleasure -- and possessed of an animal cunning when dealing with the implacable Tabby. Whether recoiling in disgust from a proffered Pret a Manger sandwich, wickedly calculating which level of "cuddles" (their ritualized form of affection) will win over Tabby, or scrambling in terror from a crucifix, Langley's work gives this outlandish situation a bred-in-the-bone terror.

Rendah Heywood, who plays Tabby, is, I suspect, equally gifted but is saddled with a character whose intentions change wildly from scene to scene. Devoted to Eve with a mixture of sisterly love and sadism, she would appear to be the toughest of cookies, if only for having spent her life sitting on such an enormous secret. However, when she goes to pay off the man she beat up, he refuses the money, instead asking her for a date. Suddenly, she is all atwitter about the possibility of romance -- a chance that seems extremely remote given her dating manners. For example, her idea of a conversational ice breaker is "I want to have an abortion, but I can't seem to get pregnant." In a play that desperately needs solid emotional grounding, Tabby's erratic behavior constantly undermines our belief.

Tabby does bring her beau home, and successfully dismisses Eve's noisemaking as the activities of mice. But soon Tabby is trying to end her arrangement with Eve ("You don't need to drink blood; you can drink Fanta!"), dropping a series of revelations that pushes Cuddles away from the supernatural and into psychological thriller territory. (In its best moments, Cuddles resembles Emma Donoghue's novel Room, another tale of a childhood spent in confinement.) Tabby's biggest bombshell explodes what little credibility Cuddles has left, and it is quickly followed by a denouement that is meant to provide a final twist; to me, it suggests that Wilde simply couldn't make up his mind.

Anyway, under Rebecca Atkinson-Lord's direction, the ladies have at each other with full fury, and that small subset of theatregoers that overlap with, say, fans of the Flowers in the Attic series of horror novels may find Cuddles to be their cup of Type O. James Turner's attic set, its walls and floor covered with stained newspaper, is as ghastly as one would wish, and Pablo Baz's lighting confidently reshapes the space for scenes set outside the house. Edward Lewis' sound design, which includes office and restaurant soundscapes, is helpful, as are the sinister storm-driven effects with which the play begins. Turner also designed the very good costumes.

Late in Cuddles, Tabby tells Eve, insistently, "We can become a family, a normal family." Fat chance: Cuddles piles horror on top of horror until giggles seem like the only appropriate response. The only certain thing is Tabby can never sell her house; there's a lot more than mice up in that attic. -- David Barbour