 Emerie Snyder as Jeanine. Photo by Ian Armstrong. | Schoolgirl Figure written by Wendy MacLeod directed by Paul Donnelly June 21-Aug 11, 2002 at Metro Cafe 1522 14th St., NW |
"Puberty is the worst thing that ever happened to me," says Renee, "I looked fabulous at age ten." Her best friend Patty totally agrees. And now that Monique -- the scrawniest schoolgirl in school -- has finally bit the big one, the girls are next (!) in line for the hottest hottie in school: The Bradley! That is, if they can out-skinny goodie-two-shoes Jeanine. Let the diet wars begin!
The cult success of The House of Yes, Wendy MacLeod's 1996 comedy about incest and JFK's assassination, left folks wondering where MacLeod's evil-satirical eye might turn next. With Schoolgirl Figure, they got their answer: anorexic and bulimic teenage girls dieting their poor little selves to death. The play, optioned by HBO in the year we got rights to it, never received a New York production. Cherry Red beat them both to the punch; presenting the East Coast premiere. Local playwright Paul Donnelly, directed the Real Teen cast (all but one of the actors was 15-20). Donnelly's directing credits include Baked Baby for Cherry Red, and I Love You for Charter Theatre. The cast featured Judith "The Adult" Baicich, Ryan Fearson, Rachyl Felty, Sica Nielson, and Emerie Snyder.
"Sick Humor"
Dolores Whiskeyman
The Washington Post
June 26, 2002
The more I see of Cherry Red Productions, the more I wonder if my standards have slipped a bit. There was a time when I was repulsed by Cherry Red's smut-for-smut's-sake aesthetic. And yet I found myself laughing (does the word "hyena" come to mind?) at its latest offering, "Schoolgirl Figure," a comedy exploring the finer points of anorexia nervosa and bulimia.
I hear you. There's nothing funny about that horrible wasting condition. How can you make fun of THAT? I hear you. And you're wrong.
Playwright Wendy MacLeod's bitter black comedy is everything Cherry Red aspires to be. It's sick. It's perverse. It's irreverent. And it's hilarious.
Act 1 opens with the members of a high school "anorexia club" lined up outside the girls' room waiting to hurl. Renee and Patty are members in good standing, having starved themselves "down to the Asian sizes." But they've got to hurry; club president Monique is on life support in a nearby hospital, and if they get there in time, they'll be the last to see her alive and the first to offer consolation to her bereaved boyfriend, "The Bradley."
Uber-cute Bradley is the prize pig for whom the girls happily jam their fingers down their throats. In this contest, she who eats the least wins first the boy, then immortality among the pantheon of dead anorexics. And Renee is not to be outdone by her chief rival, Jeanine (Emerie Snyder), a girl so determined to lose weight she exercises her head. Renee will go to any extreme to gain advantage -- even delivering the eulogy at Monique's (or is it Monica's?) funeral.
Never mind that Bradley would rather have a girlfriend with breasts. Fat, he observes, is like dirt in a garden. In the right place and in the right proportions, it's okay.
A vintage Cherry Red production by this point would have these girls puking all over the place, but director Paul Donnelly resists the urge to crank up the gross-out meter. The one scene that involves onstage regurgitation is handled rather daintily (if that's possible), and Donnelly wisely focuses on the relationships among his young actors.
Sica Nielsen, a junior at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, plays the Barbie-esque airhead Renee with just the right combination of wide-eyed innocence and deviousness. Rachyl Felty provides a nice counterpoint of skepticism as Patty, the binge-purger of the club. And Judith Baicich hams it up in a series of bit parts, including an impatient cookie vendor and a drama teacher who seems to have stepped straight out of "Sunset Boulevard."
Donnelly keeps the traffic moving as effectively as you could hope to in the cramped Metro Cafe space where Cherry Red performs. As usual, the company has little money to spend, and it shows, but costumer Rhonda Key and set designer David C. Ghatan do manage to evoke the sense of affluent, mall-ridden suburbia.
Cherry Red has always been an acquired taste for me, but this is the second production I've seen where the company's impulse toward grotesqueness has been checked in favor of staging a play that explores something that happens to be truly disgusting. In "Killer Joe" it was child sex abuse; in "Schoolgirl Figure" it's another form of child exploitation -- the impossible standards of physical beauty to which too many young girls aspire.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: We at Cherry Red apologize profusely for our earlier comments about Ms. Whiskeyman. See review of Killer Joe.]
"Just Desserts"
Patrick Folliard
The Washington Blade
July 5, 2002
IN ITS ONGOING crusade for tasteless laughs, Cherry Red Productions really delivers with "Schoolgirl Figure."
Anorexia and bulimia are very serious subjects, but they can also be funny. We've all heard the jokes.
In "Schoolgirl Figure," playwright Wendy MacLeod plums the bony subject of eating disorders and comes up with a hilarious indictment of our society in which girls are brainwashed into believing that emaciated equals desirable.
It's high school, and the girls who matter are either "Carpenters" or "Dianas." That is, either they don't eat at all, or they spew everything up after binging.
Monique, the skinniest girl in school, is dying in the hospital when non-eater Renee and her spewer sidekick Patty decide to pay a visit. Noticing a feeding tube, Renee shudders that force-feeding is like making Quakers fly the Enola Gay.
The visit isn't a corporeal work of mercy, however. Renee is plotting to get together with "The Bradley," the dying girl's boyfriend. It's an honor to be with "The Bradley," a cute boy with a long line of dead exes, because he's known for dating the skinniest girls at school. Where better to look for him than his girlfriend's deathbed?
But competition looms. Jeanine, recently released from anorexia rehab, wants The Bradley too. And after a bad case of the flu that she intentionally picked up from licking doorknobs, her dress size has dropped to new lows.
Weak from hunger, Renee mounts a campaign to make The Bradley her own. First, she manages to deliver Monique's eulogy, even though she barely knew her. Then, she and Patty suggest to goody-goody Jeanine that The Bradley might be gay -- after all, he does take a Thai cooking class and likes flat-chested girls. Renee is unstoppable, or so it seems.
In singsong voices, an unseen Greek chorus composed of girls dead from anorexia warns the girls not to eat. The punishment for even approaching a healthy weight is banishment, probably to the Midwest, Renee guesses.
BLONDE AND TOTALLY Barbie, Sica Nielson is perfectly cast as Renee. She looks like the most popular girl in high school and does a good Alicia Silverstone as Cher in "Clueless."
As Patty, Rachyl Felty is a dimwitted but good-natured. Emerie Snyder's Jeanine scarily delights in her waif-ness. As The Bradley, who ultimately turns out to be a good sort who wants his chicks to eat, Ryan Fearson curls his lips and pops his eyes a little too much, but is fine overall.
Filling in at various roles is Judith Baicich. She's especially funny as the girls' pretentious drama teacher.
What the actors might lack is in comedic experience is more than made up for by the novelty of seeing teenage actors play teenage roles. Able director and talented openly gay playwright Paul Donnelly made a really good choice in casting these young'uns. But while watching "Schoolgirl Figure," one can't help wonder, does art imitate life here? Do the women in the cast, all young, white and probably middle class -- ideal candidates for eating disorders -- fast and upchuck like their onstage alter egos? I'm sure at least one of them must.
Playing at the Metro Cafe, "Schoolgirl Figure" is acted on a small but serviceable stage in front of about 10 rows of stackable plastic chairs. David C. Ghatan's set consists mainly of photos projected onto a screen above the action, very effectively setting the scenes: a hospital room, a brick colonial, a stick-figure girl symbol that designates ladies' rooms.
Occasionally the cafe's bar becomes part of the set, acting as a hospital bed, a counter at David's Cookies and such.
Metro Cafe as theater is a relaxed atmosphere, and audience members are allowed -- and even encouraged -- to drink throughout the performance. But the crowd (at least on press night) remains pretty reserved and things never get out of hand.
