Bait Offers Christian Reform School Sex Fantasies, Swims through Symbolism
February 11, 2011
The beautiful thing about student-written college theater is that audiences get the pleasure of seeing their friend’s or acquaintance’s or LARP partner’s personality combusted into performance. One has the sense that this person they know a lot or a little or a LARP is scattered in chunks around the stage: in the black-box set pieces, in the recognizable indie tunes and in the characters who bop to them. I imagine that it is an incredible and scary feat to write and direct a show at a place where one is known, where one is clearly making themselves — and not just his or her work — vulnerable.
For this reason, watching Bait, in all its rawness, was quite a cool experience. Directorially speaking,Bait was quite strong, and writer/director/College senior Shauna Siggelkow brought a great sense of immediacy to her written work. The script itself, however, was at times inconsistent, its critique of dogmatism unfounded by the material. It alternated between easy humor and complicated emotion, and whenever the jokes fell short, the world around them likewise crumbled.
Bait tells the story of Kate (College first-year Leila Goldstein), a goody-goody who is nonetheless enrolled in a Christian reform school. Kate is facing a decision: Should she be girlfriends with a glitzy Jesus (played by College first-year Joel Ginn, who doubles as her imaginary partner in dragon-slaying), or should she get raunchy with a less crucified member of the opposite sex? To thrust herself into adulthood, Kate must abandon her infantile fantasies of a savior and accept the doldrums and solitude of adulthood, along with its sinful pleasures.
Kate just so happens to live with the perfect foil character: Cheryl (College first-year Marjolaine Goldsmith), a hot-tempered, Hot Topic-clad pseudo-nympho. A fair amount of lunacy ensues once Gus (College senior Jimmy Hagan), a dashingly awkward corrupter, climbs through Kate’s window, and her once-impenetrable morality is called into question. Such questioning leads her to break into her roommate’s stash and undergo an expertly directed hallucination, in which a mouse (College senior Claire Lachow) does a salacious dance to a tune by the Black Keys. With the mouse dance acting as a gateway to her sexuality, Kate neglects her stringent ways. She and Gus bone, of course. Jesus gets all kinds of pissed. Kate’s world collapses in on itself, Cheryl leaves the facility and Jesus becomes just plain rude. He scorns Kate and nearly convinces her to kill Gus, but she instead kills a tiny, mechanical mouse that pops out from under her sofa. The play ends.
Yeah, exactly.
Despite its rather black-and-white dealings with matters of morality, the imagery in Bait managed to become quite convoluted. As one became less and less certain of the meaning of the imagery, the play adopted a Brechtian detachment that prevented the audience from becoming immersed in the fervor. While such detachment can serve as an excellent and useful device, here it clashed with the linguistic qualities of Bait (one-liners either steeped in the acid of jaded adolescence or the honey of Jesus-loving teens). Does the mouse represent the trappings of fantasy? Male and/or female sexuality? When Kate kills the mouse, is she killing her dependency on fantasy and finalizing her journey into adulthood? Or is Gus an animorph, and has she killed him not-at-all metaphorically (at one point, he says “cheese” instead of “keys” and mousily sniffs around for keys)? In retrospect, it’s quite impressive that the ending could be so multifarious; However, the pacing and accessibility of the rest of the play seemed to suggest that the audience should be in on the symbolism of the last moment.
Concerning acting, Hagan’s Gus stole the show. Gus is, as exhibited by his oscillating pant sizes, still clearly getting comfortable with the pubescent reconfiguring of his body. Hagan deftly fidgeted and shot his voice into nervous cracking, garnering laughs simply by standing onstage in his over- or undersized pants. Goldsmith and Goldstein also gave convincing performances, and were able to humanize two relatively hackneyed archetypes (should anyone experience withdrawal from the characters of Bait, a viewing of Black Swan would surely quench that desire). Siggelkow and the set designer (College first-year Alyssa Civian) did an impeccable job adorning these two archetypes: We saw how Cheryl and Kate represent themselves both in the decorations of their split-down-the-middle dorm room and in their respective undergarments.
The Jesus character, however, was another story. Written and played by Ginn as a manipulative sprite (or perhaps like any creepy young child’s imaginary penguin), the character of Jesus inadvertently exposed the biggest hole in the script — or, perhaps, the biggest hole in Kate. The mocking, omnipresent Jesus is the only element of Kate’s fantasy world that has anything to do with actual Christianity; Her inflexible saintliness is contradicted by the fact that her idea of the religion is nothing but chastity and dragons. Given that the play doesn’t attempt to implicate biblical lore in her Dungeons and Dragons-y fantasies, one wonders why the play even aims to comment on Christianity at all. A love of Dungeons and Dragons shouldn’t preclude premarital sex and general bodily experimentation. In fact, if I know anything about the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Hall, it seems to have quite the opposite effect.