Estro 2002
New York Times
September 13, 2002
That Potent Hormone Brings Lots of
Trouble
By ANITA GATES
The play about the missing purse is the puzzle. The four other short plays in Program 1 of Estrogenius 2002 have something to say about women's roles, treatment and behavior.
Estrogenius, a monthlong festival at Manhattan Theater Source in Greenwich Village, lives up to its billing as a celebration of women's work.
The sharpest of the first five productions is Mac Rogers's (yes, a few men are involved) "Happening to Your Body." Set in a frightening near-future or in some scary religious subculture of the present, the play is about an adolescent girl facing a mandatory physical rite of passage and her understandable fear. The premise is clever. (Rod Serling would approve of how intriguingly the situation is revealed.) And the language is memorable. (The chirpy woman in charge likes to begin sentences with "What's really cool about the Lord God . . .")
Carla Johnston's "Zelda and Bernice" follows two Thelma and Louise-like women on a car trip. They're verbally assaulted by a male truck driver, and when they escape from that (well, O.K., after they blow up his truck), they turn on the car radio, only to be bombarded with hip-hop lyrics celebrating misogyny. Maybe that celebrity's well-known sexual and material independence is intended as a symbol of what women can achieve.
J. D. Eames's (that's Ms. Eames) "Intimate
ASCII" is a two-woman play about e-mail. One woman suspects that an
electronic pen pal of hers may be her long-estranged, openly homophobic
sister. There is an interesting back-and-forth (with the literary license
of immediate response time on the Palm Pilot in use). The schoolgirls who
smoke between classes in Corrina Hodgson's "Recess" are bathed
in authenticity. These are tough-talking junior high school students in
their short plaid uniform skirts expressing their individuality with heavy
makeup and purple hair, playing psychological games with one another. There
are a number of fine performances in Estrogenius, but Leslie Eva Glaser
stands out in this work as Jessica, the outsider, who turns to superheroine
fantasies to get her through the school day. "Recess" does have
a meaningful if tentative ending. And in the case of Ms. Stolowitz's play,
how many characters and funny voices Daryl Boling can do while illustrating
the difficulty of recovering missing property in New York.
