Jan. 27--Feminism carried the promise of equality in marriage -- a union between two equally empowered individuals, dividing up power, opportunity and responsibility; raising kids together; climbing the career-ladder in step; sharing emotional needs and self-actualizing a deux. With neither partner telling the other what they could -- or should -- do. And with neither leading, neither following. Just blissfully, equally, being.
Is this your marriage?
Thought not. Mine neither.
Gina Gionfriddo's aptly titled "Rapture, Blister, Burn," the amply stuffed and deeply conflicted new contemporary drama at the Goodman Theatre under the direction of Kimberly Senior, certainly lays bare the unlikelihood of life shaking out that way.
As one of its central characters -- a successful populist, feminist author -- laments, two empowered people inherently struggle to navigate all this equality, with its hopelessly idealistic notion that marriage is more about empowerment than individual sacrifice. It's not about what they believe in principle, but what they do in practice.
Or as Mary Ann Thebus says as the older Alice, "No worthwhile man wants to depend on a woman. I'm sorry; that is what I think."
Behold a deftly inserted Gionfriddo paradox: No worthwhile man. So why would a feminist bother with them? Well, in the world of this play, there is the tricky matter of what happens to all of us between middle age and death: That would be when our bad early choices or habits root us in a less than ideal place; when our carefully reared children go awry; when our parents' health fails and we lose those who loved us most of all. Then and only then, in middle age, we start to see what marriage was for all along.
In some ways, Gionfriddo's very stimulating play is very much about a long-standing dilemma: If equality is, in practice, an unworkable crock, and thus a woman has a stark choice, is she happier living a quiet life with a half-decent fellow and kids, or eschewing such niceties and pursuing solo success (and sexual and emotional happiness) in the tough urban jungle?
The main device of this play, set in the small town to which the author, Catherine, has returned to take care of her mother, Alice, revolves around two women looking at each other's lives and actually deciding to swap places.
Here's the setup. Gwen Harper (Karen Janes Woditsch) is married to Don (Mark L. Montgomery), a slacker with an easy advising job at the local college. They have a couple of kids and a mouthy baby sitter named Avery (Cassidy Slaughter-Mason). Catherine (Jennifer Coombs), one of Don's old flames, shows up envious of their life, just as the restless Gwen is envious of Catherine's New York round of books and media appearances. So since Don is a go-with-the-flow kind of guy -- his idea of fun is to stay up all night watching movies -- what if Gwen took Catherine's apartment in New York and Catherine stayed with Don? Would they find that the grass always is greener?
Well, yes, but we first have to swallow this device, especially since children are involved; the fun and emotional pull of raising them are (so shoot me) among the blind spots of this play. So, while I'm on that topic, is the canard (and common middle-aged assumption) that young, post-feminist people live neurosis-free lives of witty one liners, sexual fulfillment and moral certitude. Not true, despite all the humor and self-confidence delivered by Avery, who is amusingly played by Slaughter-Mason, but who is fundamentally a device to reflect on the older characters on the stage. It was never easy to be young.
Those nuances are lacking in other spots too. Coombs has the weight and smarts to carry the show, but she isn't especially vulnerable. Conversely, you struggle to see Woditsch's Gwen fully step up to her own ambition. Montgomery finds a middle ground, perhaps because the play asks him mostly to just be, which he does very nicely. Thebus is similarly consistent, and poignant. The ensemble jells well.
This is one of those shows where you find yourself resisting aspects of the structural premise but you become fascinated by all the things going on in the head of the writer -- a playwright with whom, it mostly seems, Senior is aptly in sync. (Senior's own husband, Jack Magaw, designed the mostly workable set.)
"Rapture" makes reference to "The Heidi Chronicles" -- another play about the choices facing women, albeit written by the late, great Wendy Wasserstein in a previous generation (it is soon to be revived on Broadway with Elisabeth Moss as Heidi).
The ending of "Rapture" is similar enough to "Heidi's," while being different, that you sense the writer is making a forcefully contrasting point.
"Rapture" gets into stuff that Heidi Holland never had to face: the appropriate response to a man who loves Internet porn, or the counter-intuitive feminist readings of horror movies as explicated by the theorist E. Ann Kaplan. Catherine's income relies on the megaphones of CNN and Fox News; not Columbia University. Different times. Different post-feminist strokes.
I doubt you'll think your time wasted at "Rapture, Blister, Burn." It is, after all, a play probing the ever-tricky question of what makes us happy in life. Bourgeois problems, perhaps, but a good motivation to be in the theater.
cjones5@tribpub.com
3 STARS
When: Through Feb. 22
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Tickets: $25-$81 at 312-443-3800 or goodmantheatre.org
