Theater Review - Feminine mystique

A young black woman sticks her tongue out at the audience. Then she places a razor blade in her open mouth and undulates her tongue so the razor flips end over end. She explains that members of South Bronx girl gangs do it to prove they’re tough, and that if you don’t want to bleed, “Your tongue gotta develop a crust.”

That’s not the kind of behavior you usually find in young women, or dialogue you hear from female playwrights. But Kia Cothron’s Breath, Boom, brought to compelling life by Synchronicity Performance Group, is the kind of play that will challenge and change your expectations for women as law-breakers and art-makers.

Only a few generations ago, “artist” and “criminal” were almost equally shameful career choices for women. Female dramatists have been ignored by history, none retaining the fame of, say, Jane Austen. (Although some women playwrights, like the 17th century’s all-but-forgotten Aphra Behn, were as popular and prolific as their male counterparts.)

Contemporary theaters, ever eager to represent diverse voices, have been helping to redress centuries of neglect. It’s kind of a shock to realize that, at this moment in theater, women are raising the majority of the clearest and freshest voices. Three of the past five Pulitzer winners have been women, and the likes of Paula Vogel and Rebecca Gilman are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Sam Shepard or David Hare.

That’s not to say that women are seeing a theatrical renaissance locally or nationally — far more male playwrights than female ones were produced in Atlanta’s 2001-02 season. But emerging women writers may have a slight edge: If a playhouse wants to stage a mix of classics and new works, the premieres are that much more likely to be written by a women.

Consider PushPush’s 2001-02 season, which featured canonical works by Shakespeare and Ibsen, as well as works by Naomi Wallace, Atlanta’s Kim Brundridge and its all-female Spring Play Festival, which presents Beth Henley’s Abundance, Naomi Wallace and Bruce McLeod’s In the Sweat and Rock Ends Ahead by Lisa Schlesinger in repertory through June 9.

Although it’s set in a small Iowa town, Rock Ends Ahead shares some common ground with the gritty big-city realism of Breath, Boom. The central character of each play — Rock’s Boone (Charity Purvis) and Breath’s Prix (Shotelle Thrash) — are teenagers suffering from memories of childhood sexual abuse. Schlesinger raises the abuse angle without sufficiently exploring it, a drawback occasionally seen in female writers both onstage and off. But Breath, Boom provides a unique angle on the subject, as Prix is haunted by the ghost of her molester.

Boone and Prix are also both defined by their obsessions. For Boone, it’s stamp collecting, and she expounds on it as she enters a doomed romance with a convict. Prix waxes eloquently about fireworks and the joy she experiences watching them. Such passages tend to be full of jargon and invariably lead to the kind of writing that sounds like the playwrights were typing with reference books in their laps. But that kind of writerly self-consciousness is by no means a feminine phenomenon.

Rock Ends Ahead had its origins as a radio play, and its texture seems more suitable for a prose work than something for the stage. But Breath, Boom is thrillingly theatrical from our first sight of 16-year-old Prix as she orders drug deals and drive-by shootings from her bedroom phone.

With savage beatings bookending the play, Breath, Boom might prompt a knee-jerk response that “this is something a man would write about.” But would a male playwright be so careful as to delineate the play’s relationships between mothers and daughters? Would a male playwright allow Prix to live long enough to reconsider her way of life — which seems nearly miraculous — or would he be more likely to make the play a grim cautionary tale?

Ultimately you can’t answer those questions, and that’s a good thing. The point is to admire a play like Breath, Boom and appreciate the fact that it doesn’t matter whether it was written by a man or woman.

NOTICES: “Courtesy of Consideration,” a 10-minute play by Essential Theatre artistic director Peter Hardy, will be presented May 31 and June 1 as part of a program of short plays at New York’s Theatre Studio Inc.

CURTAIN: Beloved local actress Suzi Bass, who specialized in playing larger-than-life women brimming with earthy humor, died of cancer on May 17. She was 55. Performing at nearly all of Atlanta’s theaters, Bass invariably delighted audiences, providing her most memorable roles in recent years at Theatre in the Square. Her film and television appearances included “I’ll Fly Away,” Fried Green Tomatoes and the upcoming Sweet Home Alabama with Reese Witherspoon.

EXITS: After two years, actor-director Scott Fugate is stepping down as artistic director of Dunwoody’s Stage Door Players.

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com

Breath, Boom plays through June 2 at the

Back Stage of 7 Stages. 404-284-1151. Rock

Ends Ahead plays through June 9 at PushPush

Theatre. 404-892-7876.

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