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I’ve never been good at horror, not even in its cheesiest forms. I caught a single clip of The silence of the lambs It’s been decades and I’ve never dared to watch the entire movie. In sixth grade, Sweeney Todd It kept me awake for weeks. and a (cough) a totally reasonable number of years ago, I did it for 40 minutes in a movie called Teeth Before I had to… extract myself. So, even though my big girl ego told me it would be fine, still with some trepidation in my identification I took my seat to see the new musical written by Anna K. Jacobs (book and music) and Michael R. Jackson. (book and lyrics) based on that 2007 film that I had never been able to finish. Then the house lights went out, the stage-wide banner emblazoned with the show’s name, splattered ominously with blood, fluttered to the floor, and it took me 30 seconds to turn my nerves into excitement. Under the direction of Sarah Benson, Teeth It feels like the musical equivalent of driving a car covered in spikes. Mad Max car through the desert while the war boys chased him on his way to Valhalla. He is a run – and it’s also a dark examination of the true strangulation of Christofascist ideology in America.
the horror of Teeth It works on two levels: there are the frightening events, which are pleasantly frightening because they are fantastic, and then there are the ideas, which are infinitely more frightening because they are the complete opposite. We’re in New Testament Village, a Christian community implicitly located somewhere in the middle of America, and our heroine, Dawn O’Keefe (the phenomenal Alyse Alan Louis), is shocked, because in his You see, as the leader of the “Promise Keeper Girls,” one of them has “let the enemy corrupt her mind.” As the rabidly charismatic leader of Dawn’s congregation, known only as Pastor, Steven Pasquale couldn’t be better: square-jawed, wild-eyed and gloriously unafraid to nibble at the scenery, he’s in his element as he shouts into a handheld microphone : “WOMEN? WHERE IS YOUR FIG LEAF? WOMEN? WHERE IS YOUR SHAME?!?Dawn’s cohort, the “PKG,” are a group of high school girls who, in Pastor’s words, have committed themselves to “the goal especially.” awesome message of female empowerment through sexual purity.” They wear the rings and they walk, and now they are all burning with divine judgment aimed at their former sister, the damningly absent Amy Sue Pearson. Because? “Because,” shouts promise-keeper Trisha (the wonderful Jenna Rose Husli), “Amy Sue got pregnant!” It is perfectly written. Later we are told that Mary “became pregnant by God the Father.”
As Pastor spewed hellfire and the PKGs shuddered in fearful ecstasy, while the boys of the congregation stood at attention in various states of torment, laughter after laughter erupted from my morning audience. From me too: Jacobs and Jackson’s book is immediately and consistently funny. Later, Dawn and her pious stud boyfriend, Tobey (Jason Gotay), share a duet called “Modest Is Hottest” that is as fine a piece of comedic songwriting as I’ve heard in many a menstrual cycle. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if the extreme of our joy arose from a New York crowd’s sense of ironic distance. It’s not an inappropriate response and it might be unavoidable, but here’s the thing: Teeth It’s not really satire. Before its more nightmarish devices emerge, it is, frighteningly, realism with loud songs.
As Dawn and the PKG launched into “Precious Gift,” a rousing anthem about the important task of preserving virginity, I found myself remembering another show on this same stage at Playwrights Horizons. Will Arbery is somber and arrogant. Heroes of the fourth turn At first glance it may not seem to have much in common with a gory and obscene musical, but Teeth He is his spiritual brother. Both works are journeys into a particularly American darkness and come from places of painful personal knowledge. Jackson, whose Pulitzer Prize A strange loop He also delves into shame: he writes about his own Baptist upbringing in the show’s program and has talked about understand “what it is like to be afraid of your own body and feel like… you are going to hell.” The true pulse and power of Teeth is that, even as its blushing flower ripens into a monstrous fruit, it maintains its driving supertask. It’s not really a show about vagina dentata, but about the cancerous cycles of self-loathing, misogyny, and violence that fester at the heart of purity culture.
Well, it’s also about the vagina dentata. Dawn is headed for a traumatic discovery of what’s hidden in the girly parts of her. Despite her holiest efforts, she and Tobey (and, for that matter, all of Pastor’s slave children) are very horny. Dawn’s desire frightens and repulses her (you don’t have to have been raised evangelical to suffer during her heartbreaking self-punishment song, “The Shame in My Body”), while, for her stepbrother, Brad (Will Connolly, wonderful at be horrible), desire and shame have long since rotted into hate. Brad is Pastor’s son, Dawn his stepdaughter, and both mothers are out of the picture: Brad ran away, Dawn died. “He’s jealous,” Pastor tells Dawn, “because even though you’re not my biological son and he is, the two of us couldn’t be more united by the blood of the lamb.” While Dawn and Tobey battle his raging hormones, Brad descends into the dark web. Behind a virtual reality mask, he encounters his own spiritual leader, a male life coach named Godfather (voiced by Pasquale) who blames “male pain” on “he feminocracy” and calls its premium subscribers “Truth Seekers.” Again, is it satire if, with a few clicks, everything can be proven to be sickeningly real?
Brad’s male pain is specific, and it’s specifically related to Dawn: he’s missing the first joint of a finger because, when they were kids (sings, face pale and eyes blazing) “She bit me / He It bit me.” Only Brad suspects what Dawn will soon learn, when she and Tobey finally succumb to mutual longing one night at a lake. Crucially, Tobey has proposed to her and Dawn loves him. She feels safe until he stops listening to her. , until he hurts her and something inside her bites her. Now prop designer Matt Carlin starts having some real fun. From now on, if you don’t want to see a bunch of bloody severed phalluses, close your eyes. Because once Dawn’s second set of teeth has taken its first bite, the show that bears her name jumps into allegorical revenge mode.
At first, it’s a bloody explosion: real flames erupt from Adam Rigg’s seemingly simple set, which turns out to contain an entire basket of Easter eggs; Pasquale manages to deliver another wild turn as an oleaginous gynecologist whose sensational, smarmy (“Girls Like You”) seems like a finishing touch to Small store‘s cowardly dentist while also reaching its own magnificent levels of shame; the closeted gay guy in the congregation, Dawn’s friend Ryan (I saw Sean Doherty replacing Jared Loftin and knocking it out of the park), gets a deliciously nasty betrayal arc; and the PKG, each a powerhouse, majestically assume their ever-expanding role as Greek chorus, shape-shifting from leather-clad demons to mourning widows and ravenous bacchantes.
There is, however, a but next. the greatest TeethThe more Guignol becomes, the more diffuse it feels. Climbing is a complicated business, so SNL sketches are rarely entirely successful; Writers know how to build but not finish. Teeth —which is so good in so many ways—currently suffers from the same problem. As Dawn goes from being terrified of her own body to being a righteous bearer of her vulvic weaponry, the story of a real young woman’s empowerment and deep suffering is obscured under a splash of apocalypticism. Separately exploring the obscure Wikipedia, both Ryan and Brad find an entry about an ancient goddess named Dentata. “She’s at the heart of men’s castration fears,” Ryan sings, to which Brad adds, sending his online friends Truthseeker into a frenzy, “Soon she’ll build an army and one by one / They’ll kill.” I don’t want to spoil the details of Teethis the end, but you can probably guess that it’s a Book of Revelations-style affair, which turns into something gruesome and mass destruction like Tetsuo at the end of akira. At the end, in a gesture that seems too tired to be worthy of most of Jacobs and Jackson’s writings, the goddess directs her voracious, merciless gaze toward the audience. We are… oh, a word that is never as effective as we want it to be… involved.
It’s a shame, because we are also, in the show’s final moments, more distanced from the true anguish at its heart than we have been all along. What about the sunrise? What happens to girls who are raised to hate themselves, who blame themselves for the fall of man, who blame themselves when they are raped? What happens – not only in the panorama of intensified horror but in the world in which we all have to live every day – when so much internalized violence erupts? “The moon turns red and the lines blur,” Dawn sings, “and inside my head I’m reborn as her.” That Inside my head is crucial, but that’s not how Jacobs, Jackson and Benson interpret it. By blowing off the top of Teeth – by driving as hard as they do towards literal Armageddon – the show’s creators may wreak fun theatrical havoc, but they also end up sacrificing a good portion of the humanity of their story. And there is an additional sense of unsettling confusion in the bloody defeat: male and female violence are not exactly equated, but they are no longer as precisely distinguished in form and cause. While it’s tempting to go big and bold, Teeth it loses something when its seams burst. But what he has is still, at many moments, hot as lava and sharp canines. Beneath the fire and blood, the mythical battles and the severed cocks (within the promise ring and cheap paneled walls of the church recreation room) lies the real horror show.
Teeth is at Playwrights Horizons until April 14.