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Alena Smith’s The Lacy Project, directed by Josh Bristol, plays at the Strand Theater through February 27th. It hasn’t received a lot of notice in the local papers, but this production deserves a second look, especially by those who say theatre is losing its younger audience. This is a play by a gifted young playwright, about young people today.
Smith wrote The Lacy Project in 2002 while still at the Yale School of Drama. By random coincidence, I had just seen The Natasha Plays by Russian playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich, also 22, in workshop production at Towson University.
For its 70 minutes, The Lacy Project is astonishingly complex — weaving together subplots, imagery, riffs on pop culture, and characters. Lacy (Lauren Lakis) is a trust fund baby who is waiting for her mother, who is a celebrated photographer, to come to her house to snap her photo as part of a birthday ritual. Giselle (Britt Olsen-Ecker) comes from the same elevated social mileu, but has turned into a coke-snorting hip hop wannabe. Charlotte (Leah Raulerson), Lacy’s roommate, is a middle class girl with a boring day-job, and artistic aspirations. And they’re all waiting for Giselle’s mom to arrive.
This production’s high energy riffs on three manifestations of NYC girlhood: the princess, the party girl, and the artistic type. Lacy (the cute one) wanders in tugging two bags of designer clothes just purchased off Seventh Avenue. Giselle (the party girl) has a bag of blow. And Charlotte (the serious one) has her camera.
So far, it sounds like a sitcom pilot.
Smith is clearly conscious of the role models that these girls have slipped into, as are the girls themselves. They don’t like where they’ve found themselves.
The play’s backdrop shows several pink balloons, smashing through a window into a deep-blue sky. We’re not sure as audience members what exactly the “reality zone” is. But the stage itself is one additional layer of artifice in the lives of three girls who have constructed alternate universes for themselves.
The last plays I’d seen, by 22 year-old Yaroslava Pulinovich, a Russian playwright, were also about young women, who were also dealing with cultural pressures. But her plays, both in the form of monologues, had an almost completely different approach to the theatrical medium. In her two monologues, the stage is a platform for young characters who would have no other place to make their voices heard.
In this production of The Lacy Project, the opposite is true. The stage is a platform for the playwright to entangle her young characters in the web of pop culture and alternate realities that have turned them into a feuding, but interdependent coterie. By the end of the play, it’s a virtual prison: if any one of these characters really wants to “be herself,” she has to get out.
There’s a window on the set that hangs in the front of the stage and looks out at the audience. It obstructs the view, but also drives a point home. Anything “real” happens outside the tiny apartment that makes up the stage. Even the play’s most real moment – the death of Giselle – occurs on the street below.
Don’t get me wrong. Smith’s play is really worth checking out, and we can thank The Strand for bringing quality playwrights like Smith to our attention.
But there’s something thought-provoking about the situation her characters are in. Pulinovich’s girls — archetypal Russian figures — are using their moment in the spotlight to make their voices and desires heard. The audience, clearly, is there to listen.
Smith’s characters don’t have desires of their own to begin with.
Maybe it’s just because I’m still seeing double after watching Avatar a few hours ago. But the unspoken assumption that, even when something seems to be happening, it isn’t really happening, seems to have turned into an everpresent American narrative. Is the stage really a place where that narrative can be acted out?
At least according to the contract, and Pulinovich seems to subscribe to it, the stage is where something is happening that can happen nowhere else.
As a new generation of American playwrights, Smith included, starts to develop a recognizable voice, they’re working in a world where the drama in life is the drama of characters wiggling through the mess created by a pop culture. Alena Smith has her finger on real characters in real time. But what’s missing is the accepted sense that the stage is a liberating platform for saying something that would otherwise remain unsaid.
But as I watched this fascinating production, it struck me that in our own theater culture, the audience, the playwrights, and the characters are shuffling around, looking for a place that they can call their own. To me, Alena Smith is a highly skilled playwright for someone so young. But Pulinovich seems to have more confidence that she’s actually chosen the right medium to work in.
Tags: Baltimore, Britt Olsen-Ecker, Josh Bristol, Lauren Lakis, Leah Raulerson, Natasha Plays, Strand Theater, The Lacy Project, Yaroslava Pulinovich
Filed Under: Feature Sights
I think its interesting that the characteristics of the Russian college age girls are very universal —although they are coming from different backgrounds they don’t like where they are in life. I think the same could be said about a variety of American girls at that age. This sounds like a really interesting play, I’ll have to check it out.
February 18, 2010 1:23 pm