Theatre in Review: Emotional Creature (Pershing Square Signature Center)

	Photo: Carol Rosegg

There are six absolutely marvelous things about Emotional Creature, and their names are Ashley Bryant, Molly Carden, Emily S. Grosland, Joaquina Kalukango, Sade Namei, and Olivia Oguma. In addition to their energy and high spirits, this cast of fresh faces embraces the many challenges of Eve Ensler's text, which explores, as the subtitle says, "the secret life of girls around the world." It doesn't matter whether the material is smart and sassy or deeply anguished; these talented young ladies breeze through every assignment as if it were the easiest of easy As. Cheers to Jo Bonney, the director, for casting them; I expect to be seeing each of them again, and soon.

Based on a book by Ensler and developed through workshops at Vassar College and in Johannesburg and Paris, Emotional Creature reflects its author's high exuberance, which is the show's blessing and its curse. The first few monologues delve deeply into the kinds of anxieties that afflict today's young women, no matter how smart and talented they may be. One high school student, desperate to maintain a toehold of social respectability, frets that she was "accidentally nice" to an outcast in full view of the ruling clique of mean girls. Another young lady, obsessed with body image, says, "I long for a feeding tube," to keep herself fed without putting on pounds. A third girl, from Teheran, regrets the rhinoplasty that removed her most distinctive feature, adding, "I don't want to be a princess; I was happy being a clown." All the usual hot-button issues are touched upon, including contraception (including an amusingly embarrassed discussion of tropical-flavored condoms), abortion ("It's not a baby, it's a maybe"), and lesbianism (one girl worries that she is seen as a carrier of "gay contagion").

But Ensler isn't content to examine these relatively universal conundrums, and suddenly Emotional Creature veers into much darker territory, focusing on a Bulgarian prostitute who has been hideously brutalized ("I am a garbage pail; I am a receptacle"), a teenager who fantasizes about suicide, and a Tanzanian girl on the run from a clitoridectomy. By pairing these harrowing episodes with breezier passages that begin with statements like "My short skirt is about discovering the power of my inner calves," Ensler risks creating the impression that, when it comes to the challenges these girls face, they are all the same. As is often the case with this writer, she is profoundly uncurious about the political, social, economic, and theological forces that put her subjects in such dark places, preferring to see them as casualties of a kind of worldwide war against women. The cure-all appears to be self-esteem -- a good thing to have, to be sure -- but it's probably not likely to help much help when you're being held hostage by a brutal Eastern European pimp.

The best passage in Emotional Creature focuses on a worker in a Shenzhen factory who spends her days assembling Barbie dolls. It's a nearly ideal piece that, without sacrificing a bit of humor, makes strong points about the conditions under which many Asians slave to create a product that is an unattainable Western fantasy of ideal womanhood. (One especially telling passage reveals how a single Barbie doll is constructed out of components manufactured in Third World companies from around the globe, each set of workers contributing to that eerie plastic representation of anatomically impossible blonde femininity.) By the time the monologue ends -- with chants of "Free Barbie!" -- you may be willing to join in, too.

Otherwise, Emotional Creature is more pep rally than play, a jumble of elements, both winsome and harrowing, thrown together with little or no context and punctuated by a couple of passably catchy tunes, with lyrics along the lines of "Give me something to believe in that isn't a brand name." It unfolds on a set, by Myung Hee Cho, that features a circular stage backed by an enormous curved screen. Shawn Sagady's projections -- whether a single, all-enveloping image or a trio, which move up and down in slot-machine fashion -- occasionally overwhelm the people on stage. (Cho's set also features a series of cubbyholes, which, like school lockers, are stuffed with objects relevant to the characters; he also designed the costumes, a perfect collection of up-to-the-minute casual wear.) Lap Chi Chu's lighting and Jake Rodriguez's sound are both solid achievements.

Emotional Creature may be just the ticket for the adolescent girl in your life, although, at the performance I attended, an audience of female students was rather more polite in their response than I would have anticipated. As in her other works, Eve Ensler is an activist in the guise of a writer. But I can't help feeling that by offering up realistically complex people in conflicted and morally ambiguous situations -- in other words, by behaving like a real playwright -- she would do so much more for her cause.-David Barbour