Welcome to the world of the Brooklyn Scalliwags, an all-female roller derby team fighting to hang together and win a league championship. With names like Squeaky Mouse, Trauma Queen, Hot Flash and Maid of Metal, they are a colorful, profane, bawdy bunch of warriors on wheels. For the Love, now being performed at the Kirk Douglas Theater as part of its Block Party Series (annual repeats of L.A. small-theatre productions), brings that world to life in a loud, swirling, in-your-face production directed and choreographed by Rhonda Kohl. Written by Gina Femia, the play, which was first produced locally by Theater of Note in 2018, is unabashedly feminist (not a single male in the 14-person cast) in viewpoint and execution. Boyfriends and husbands are mentioned in the course of things, usually in derogatory, scathing fashion. And the two of the three love affairs depicted are lesbian in nature. Joy Ride (the scintillating Briana Price) is more or less the protagonist of the play (Femia’s focus is not always on her). A young African-American gal, she is the newest member of the Scalliwags and pretty much unprepared for the rough-and-tumble life of a semi-professional skater. She learns fast though and becomes adept at the game, so much so that when she becomes disillusioned with the sport and threatens to quit, the team’s coach, Andrea the Vagiant (the officious, hard-boiled Alina Phelan), breaks down and begs her to stay. Joy Ride, who works in a Foot Locker store to support herself (all the gals have side jobs or are in school), has a big need to assert herself, having spent her life being told what to do by parents, friends, and above all by her lover Michelle (the sympathetic Elinor Gunn). Joy’s decision to go her own way by play’s end is brave and touching. Joy is also emotionally (but not physically) involved with Lizzie Lightning (the dynamic Tania Verafield), the foul-mouthed, cynical star of the team whose day job is running a tattoo parlor. Lizzie has no use for Andrea’s platitudinous pep talks about team spirit and winning. “We’re not in the derby for money or glory or any of that bullshit but simply for the love of the game,” she says (or words to that effect). The many rapid-fire scenes that pepper Femia’s script take place on Eli Smith’s rink-like set and are punctuated by Gilly Moon’s evocative sound and music design. The action is fast and furious, with the cast helping out on set changes and then donning helmets and falling into roller-derby formations and miming the competitive nature of the sport, with its speed skating, jams, chases, and bursting through the pack. Kohl’s choreography is every bit as important and dazzling as is her direction. You get an authentic sense of what it’s like to be a derby skater, living life at a high, frenetic and dangerous level, with the adrenalin pumping away in your veins and making you giddy with excitement and joy.
