Eric (Justin Bartha), a weedy professor of computer science, has his wife Cynthia (Elizabeth Reaser) splayed across his lap. His hand is raised to give her another firm smack on the bottom when suddenly he hesitates. “This is about God, right?”
“Sure,” she says as she wriggles lasciviously. “Sure it is.”
In Permission, Robert Askins, whose rather more scabrous Hand to God is running on Broadway, has gifted New York another satire of conservative Christians wilding out. Permission may be less riotous than Hand to God and less wonderfully unruly, but it’s working to ground itself in real characters and real situations, at least until the spanking starts.
Eric and Cynthia are a married couple in Waco, Texas. They have recently become interested in Christian Domestic Discipline after watching their friend Zach (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) wallop his wife, Michelle (Nicole Lowrance), with a hairbrush. CDD, they learn, is a practice in which “the wife is submissive to her husband as if the Lord Himself was her husband” and that submission apparently requires a rosy bottom.
Eric and Cynthia aren’t especially happy in their marriage or their lives, so they give CDD a try. Obviously they’re doing it for the kink, but they tell themselves they’re doing it for Christ. “We can do better. We have to do better. For ourselves and for the almighty,” Eric says as he spanks Cynthia. She cries out in an ecstasy that doesn’t seem particularly holy.
Like Hand to God, Permission invites you to laugh at the absurdity of evangelicals, but it asks that you sympathize with them too – even the cartoonish Zach, even the doltish Eric. And like that earlier play, it reinforces some pretty conservative gender stereotypes (of women wanting to be dominated by men, of men wanting to be mothered by women), even as it flirts with rebelling against them.
Though Alex Timbers offers frisky and sympathetic direction, some of the scenes could use a little more shaping – certain openings fall flat and some of the endings do, too. (David Korins’ unusually unwieldy set could use reshaping as well.) But most of what’s in the middle is very funny and sometimes slyly poignant. Bartha, of the Hangover trilogy, and Reaser, a familiar face on Mad Men this season, are capable actors, but it’s Near-Verbrugghe and Lowrance who give the thumping great performances.
The action climaxes in a rowdy, debauched dinner party, which has Cynthia shouting, unconvincingly: “We are not Christian swingers. We are Christian spankers.” As there’s an unassailable theatrical maxim that no onstage dinner party can end well, this one degenerates swiftly and brutally. Despite a semi-redemptive coda, Permission is a comedy that leaves bruises.
