Theatre in Review: Mary Gets Hers (The Playwright's Realm) If you've been looking for a lighthearted romp among medieval anchorites, Mary Gets Hers is just the thing. Still, even the play's stoutest enthusiasts must be aware that they are targeting a necessarily limited audience. Emma Horwitz's satiric comedy, is, surprisingly, a riff on a piece by Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, a tenth-century holy woman who, among other things, is probably Western civilization's first dramatist of the post-Classical era. What Horwitz has taken from that good lady is hard to divine, since Mary Gets Hers is suffused with a thoroughly contemporary sensibility, featuring monks crying out in their unbelief and a bewilderingly innocent title character who is treated as both an object of veneration and abuse. When we first meet her, Mary is an eight-year-old orphan, her parents having been eliminated by the latest outbreak of the plague. (As the script notes, in the 900s, such afflictions occurred with clockwork regularity.) Left alone in the world, Mary gets scooped up by the pious Abraham, bringing her back to his monastery. Abraham, who tends to fret, tells, his colleague Ephraim, "I'm so worried that this poor orphan girl's loveliness and purity has already become ruined by the taint of sin, or worse, I'm worried that even if her loveliness and purity has not already become ruined by the taint of sin she will be at great and imminent risk of soon being ruined by the taint of sin if she does not at least become betrothed to God-!" Abraham's solution to any possible encroachments on Mary's purity is to lock her up in a cell-within-his-cell, where he treats her in a manner somewhere between a sacred relic and a house pet. Eventually, she escapes, ending up at an inn where the owner establishes her in an upstairs chamber for the entertainment of his clientele. That the many men who claim to love her, for a few minutes at least, are really paying customers doesn't occur to Mary until the appearance of The Soldier, who has been dispatched by Abraham to find her. But Mary is soon on the self-realization track, as evidenced by an eleventh-hour musical number, complete with disco ball, positing, as per that noted philosopher Whitney Houston, that learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all. Indeed, it's possible to see Mary Gets Hers as a kind of first-millennium Barbie, a female figure both fetishized and used until she claims her humanity for herself. If so, it's more than a little strange that Mary is left offstage so much of the time and, when she does turn up, how little she has to say for herself. A disconcertingly large amount of time is expended on Abraham and Ephraim, who form a kind of theological vaudeville act, slinking around the stage like chorus dancers, or bopping about as if stepping on handsprings. (It's not clear what order they belong to, but I suspect theirs might be the original Ministry of Silly Walks.) They pray by prostrating themselves and keening God's name at length; I don't know how God feels about it, but it did nothing for me. Ephraim, the more devout of the two, enjoys a good hair shirt, yet he suffers the most from a nagging feeling of God's absence. By the time we get back to Mary and her parade of lovers -- her sexual slavery is represented in the most antiseptic manner possible -- it's easy to forget that the play is, at least nominally, about her. Perhaps this doesn't matter, because Mary Gets Hers is suffused with a college-style humor that never really explains the author's infatuation with the religious ideas and rituals of another millennium. Given Mary's dual roles -- as a potential bride of Christ and a prostitute -- we're dealing with that hardy perennial, the Madonna-whore complex, but it is handled with little force or wit. There is a running joke, made with dogged regularity, about the plague reducing people to "foam." Mary, stating the obvious, notes, "It's actually kind of upsetting to be told 'I love you' so many times over and over and over again without anyone actually knowing who you are." Abraham and Ephraim natter on in exhaustive detail about a dream, focusing on a dragon, which is a sublimated expression of physical desire. If Josiah Davis, who impressed with his bravura staging of Amani at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre last season, seems uncertain here, it's not surprising. Susannah Perkins, who can rightfully be termed the in-house star at The Playwrights Realm, is solid as earnest Abraham, whose obsession with Mary drives much of the action. Ephraim is played by Octavia Chavez-Richmond, an attention-getting presence with an impressively modulated vocal instrument; she makes the most of the play's best speech, a lengthy prayer begging God to reveal himself. Haley Wong's flat-affect approach is probably the only way to play Mary, but it doesn't make her any more interesting. Similarly, the design team struggles to come up with a strong response to the text. You-Shin Chen's scenery, involving multiple curtains, at least reshapes the space as needed, as does Cha See's lighting in certain scenes, but neither contribution makes much of a statement. Kathy Ruvuna's sound design, which ranges from birdsong to organ music and chants, does the most to suggest the world of the play. Camilla Dely's costumes include amusing tonsure wigs for the monks, a chain mail uniform for the Soldier, some fake chest hair for the innkeeper, and Ephraim's hair shirt, all imaginatively rendered. Overall, the play pursues such obvious points that I began to wonder if the whole thing was the theatrical equivalent of a trick question; surely, I kept thinking, it must mean more than it appears to say. In the end, Mary gets hers, but does the audience get theirs? That's a rather more difficult question. --David Barbour 
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