Dan Myers
Left to right: Whitney Derendinger, Kate Boomsma and Deborah Hearst play former grad school friends who chose very different life paths.
In the second act of Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn, Avery — a 21-year-old college student — describes her parents’ success fantasy for her: If only she hadn’t given up ice skating as a child, she would have become an Olympic figure skater.
This kind of “what-if” fantasy preoccupies every character in the play, presented by Mercury Players Theatre on the Evjue Stage at the Bartell Theatre, through Oct. 3.
On the surface, the play is a debate about feminism and whether women really can “have it all” – a thriving career, a healthy marriage and children while still finding intellectual stimulation, personal fulfillment and balance. These questions are addressed informally when a group of graduate school friends reunites after 20 years apart. They are also confronted formally as Catherine, a rock-star academic and feminist theorist, begins teaching a class on feminism in her living room.
At the top of the play, Catherine has come home to care for her ailing mother and catch up with her friends Gwen and Don, old classmates with a messy history. Gwen (Kate Boomsma) was Catherine’s roommate in school. She married Don, Catherine’s likable lump of an ex-boyfriend (Whitney Derendinger), gave up her academic goals and settled down to have children. Recently sober, she is unable to stop confessing every feeling and thought that comes into her head, including the fact that she’s stuck in a joyless marriage to a disappointing man, haunted by unrealized dreams of professional success.
Catherine (played with nuance and honesty by Deborah Hearst) is equally unhappy. Her book tours and TV interviews have not compensated for the loneliness she feels after dozens of doomed relationships. The women are so eager to test out the green grass on the other side of the fence that they agree to change places for the summer (not a novel concept, considering that spouse-swapping reality shows exist). Catherine will live with Don, and Gwen can run off to New York, enroll in classes and live in Catherine’s apartment. Not surprisingly, neither woman finds the experiment as idyllic as she hoped.
Although the play seems overly academic at times, treading over familiar territory, the production is buoyed by terrific performances. Deborah Hearst shines as Catherine, fully embodying the unhappy intellectual who has made her career studying the relationships between men and women yet is unable to make good decisions about her own personal life. Her real-life spouse, Whitney Derendinger, is also charming as a guy with little ambition who is happiest when he’s helping troubled college students turn their lives around. Outside the central threesome are Avery (a snappy Katy Briggs), the college student endowed with self-assurance only afforded the very young, and Catherine’s mother, Alice (a lovely Sarah Whelan), whose life choices were dictated by a very different set of historical circumstances.
When not bogged down by epic scene changes and static staging, the production is quite engaging. And as a bonus, you might gain a new, feminist perspective on slasher horror films of the 80s after seeing it.
