Theater Review: Rapture, Blister, Burn at The Wilma Theater
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
"It's a fun and exhilarating ride ... but it's less sophisticated than it looks."
DESIGNING WOMEN: Campbell M. O’Hare and Krista Apple-Hodge stop being polite and start getting real in Rapture, Blister, Burn.
Alexander Iziliaev
Alexander Iziliaev
Feminism. Post Feminism. Raunch Feminism. The complex, ongoing evolution of the women’s movement — and its effect on living, breathing females — is the subject of Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn. It’s a fun and sometimes exhilarating ride, packed with ideas. Ultimately, though, the script proves more conventional than it initially appears.
Catherine (played by Krista Apple-Hodge), a media studies professor and semi-celebrity (think Camille Paglia), has returned to the small town where she grew up to attend to her ailing mother. Once there, she’s also reunited with a pair of graduate school friends, Gwen and Don, now married, with whom Catherine — whose career is in high gear but whose personal life is unfulfilled — shares significant history.
The substance of Gionfriddo’s play takes the form of intergenerational conversations by and about women. Included in the group are Catherine and Gwen and a brash young student named Avery (charmingly played by Campbell O’Hare, in the show’s best performance). Alice, Catherine’s droll mother (the fine Nancy Boykin), sometimes joins in.
Ostensibly, the context is a seminar Catherine is teaching. But it looks more like a book group, where the reading assignment is regularly sublimated to what we might generously call autobiographical narrative. A lot of this is amusing, and Gionfriddo certainly shows off her sharp intellect.
But the politics are muddled and ambivalent. With iconic, problematic figures like Phyllis Schlafly, Gionfriddo seems to want to both skewer and embrace them. (For me, I wish the play had the kind of bite Paglia can bring to the topic — I’m often infuriated by her thinking, but always captivated by her brilliantly sharp prose.)
Rapture marks the Wilma debut of Joanna Settle, a noted director in regional theatre, now also director of the Ira Brind School of Theater Arts at UArts. Settle announces herself here in high style, with a visually arresting, sleekly deconstructed production. But it’s less sophisticated than it looks, and a poor fit for the fundamentally realistic play. There’s little sense of conversation and nuance. Instead, the talented actors (also including Maia DeSanti and Harry Smith) strike poses, and announce their lines like so much dogma.
A more straightforward approach would work better, but there are weaknesses in Rapture that no director can resolve. Put it this way — for all the knowing badinage about feminist theory, Internet porn and Rousseau, by Act 2, the play has turned into Freaky Friday. No, make that Freaky Nancy Friday (as in the feminist author).
Through Nov. 8, Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., 215-546-7824, wilmatheater.org.
