If you've never seen a Gina Gionfriddo play before, be wary of hasty impressions based on her work for television. Left to her own devices, this mischievous playwright displays a fondness for luring audiences into anticipating one kind of story, then abruptly changing directions to refute our initial assumptions.
In Rapture, Blister, Burn, first we are introduced to Catherine Croll, a glamorous, high-profile scholar celebrated for her feminist analyses of sexy topics like pornography and slasher movies. Next, we meet her former grad-school chum, Gwen Harper, now a micromanaging wife and mommy in the college town that Catherine abandoned in pursuit of greater rewards.
Also lending their presence are the latter's mother, Alice, still spry despite having recently suffered a heart attack, along with hipster student Avery Willard. The occasion of Catherine's homecoming is a contract for her to teach a seminar in her subject of expertise, a premise leading us to expect a flood of the what-do-modern-empowered-women-want polemics currently in fashion, safely proclaiming the answer to be "a man"—in this case, represented by Gwen's sluggish husband Don, whose early promise has faded under the challenge of the overachievers in his purview.
Gionfriddo's three-generation symposium devotes a modicum of performance time to parsing feminist theory in the 1960s, the 1980s, and the present day—discussion encompassing a generously revisionist read of Phyllis Schlafly, whose gospel of women-as-keepers-of-civilization-and-tamers-of-cave-men contrasts vividly with Avery's equation of alcohol, sex and hormones as impairments to rational decisions. ("The love-drunk lasts six months—just long enough to get knocked up and trapped.")
Only after Gwen and Catherine cook up a scheme to swap lifestyles for the summer do we see their choices—and their alleged regrets over roads not taken—put to the test. In the end, it comes as small surprise when everybody winds up exactly where they started, albeit now content with their mid-life status.
Under Kimberly Senior's direction, the all-star cast assembled for this Goodman production are careful not to prejudice playgoers through exaggerated caricature but instead allow each of us to revere or revile, guided by our individual experience. Ironically, even the overheard-in-the-lobby responses to Gionfriddo's manifesto defy predictability, with AARP-level spinsters cheering on young Avery's brutally unsentimental assessments, and males of all ages expressing sympathy for the unprepossessing Don—but isn't that what the freedom to follow your own bliss was always about?
