Theatre in Review: Grasses of a Thousand Colors (Theatre for a New Audience/The Public Theater)

	Wallace Shawn. Photo: Joan Marcus

Entering the Susan Stein Shiva Theater at the Public, an usher cheerfully informed us that if we left during Grasses of a Thousand Colors we would not be permitted to return until after intermission. "A hostage situation," joked the woman in front of me, words that came back to haunt me more than once in the three hours and 20 minutes that followed. A giant digression in search of a play, Wallace Shawn's 2009 drama is presented as a work of high seriousness dealing with issues -- nutrition and ecology -- that are among the most central of our time. (At the performance I attended, a panel of worthies, led by the likes of Marion Nestle, had been commandeered for an after-show discussion.) Fair enough, but mostly it is a three-act verbal sextravaganza featuring a bewildering variety of coital acts involving men, women, cats, and mice, ending in the extermination of the human race. I may have left some species out of that last sentence; if so, I apologize. You can only remember so much when your mind is reeling.

Shawn is Ben, a scientist in his mid-60s who has ostensibly come to discuss his memoirs. There are allusions to sinister developments in the land, most notably "the awful stomach illness that had suddenly and mysteriously appeared in our midst at a certain point," but soon we're off to Ben's glorious youth: "I came, you see, from an optimistic generation. Everyone I knew from my generation was a fixer, an improver." Ben's contribution to this glorious march of history was Grain Number One, which "enabled 90% of the existing animal species on earth, including 80% of the herbivores, to achieve astonishing efficiency in chemically breaking down the flesh of other animals, including the flesh of members of their own species, dramatically reducing their need to consume plants." One of the initial side effects of GNO is an astonishing vitality in those who eat it. "Pigs, for example, would frequently have sexual intercourse 15 or 16 times every single day."

Soon the humans were acting like pigs. "People began to talk about their penises and vaginas in such detail at dinner parties and in magazines and in interviews," Ben says. So great were the changes that he notes, with mild astonishment, when he was a boy, "Parents never masturbated in front of their children. In fact, children never masturbated in front of their parents! And children of course would never make out with their parents or fuck them, ever, because that would have been seen as utterly shocking."

Ben gets married to Cerise, who seems to have a thing for cats, since she pops up from behind the couch, reading to us from a children's book called Facts About Cats. Before long, she is off in the country, and Ben is taking up with the lubricious Robin. "I pulled down my trousers, and I was sucked inside her with a slurping noise almost before we hit the ground," he recalls, offering an early favorite for this year's Guardian Bad Sex Award, although, in something of a feat, he quickly follows up with a real contender for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest: "My underpants felt like a disordered room where a party had been held, the champagne and confetti not yet cleared away."

We are now in Act II, and Ben is now living with Robin -- who offers him a home that is "a shrine to the cult of the penis" -- yet making visits to a magical realist castle where a bloody encounter with Blanche, a cat, has led to a taste for mice casseroles and bouts of enchanted interspecies sex. This unearthly paradise can't last, however, and Robin, in a fit of jealousy, slaughters Blanche. Robin even returns to her husband for bouts of revenge sex. "Through the crack of the open bedroom door, I could see her husband Mike disconsolately covering his enormous member with a small bit of underwear," Ben says. "The hint of sexuality was unmistakable." By the end of the act, Robin is shopping around for a new girlfriend for Ben, which leads to Rose, a nice young ceramics designer, who has helpfully put a picture of her vagina on her business card.

In Act III, Rose is Ben's new lover, Robin is off in the country with Cerise, and Blanche, the cat, is back. (Don't ask.) And kitty makes three: "Rose and Blanche and I would crawl underneath the bright green sheets, and Rose would lead us through these ridiculous, hilarious games," Ben says, but the end is near. The euphoric effects of Grain Number One -- remember Grain Number One? -- have worn off, leaving its users with the inability to digest anything at all. We are treated to descriptions of streets filled with people vomiting their lives away, dead animals piling up in the country. Cerise shows up and tries to help. "Sometimes, at night, while I was urinating on him -- urine filling up his navel as if it were a little cup, then spilling everywhere," she says, she would attempt to get those colored lights going, but death was in the air.

There's more, including the unmasking of Blanche's true identity, but you get the idea. Clearly, if Shawn intended to create a frightening fable of overconsumption in a hedonistic society, that plan was hijacked by the lumbering humor and mind-numbingly detailed sexual fantasia that occupies most of its running time. By the time we get back to the end of the world, it's something of a relief. The death of humanity seems like a small price to pay if we never have to again hear about Ben's dick.

As always, Shawn, under what I assume to be the endlessly patient direction of Andre Gregory, is a peerless interpreter of his own works, delivering one lengthy speech after another with the relish of a man saying it all for the first time. Even if that squeaky-hinge voice theatens to drive you mad, you almost have to admire his willingness to spare himself nothing in the telling of this weird and off-putting tale. As Cerise, Julie Hagerty is a figure of quiet dignity, even when delivering lines like "I liked to have his dick inside me; it gave me something to think about." The real event of the evening, however, is the matchup between Shawn and Jennifer Tilly's Robin, red ribbons entwined in her hair, an ample bosom threatening to make an entrance of its own as she rearranges herself into another studied, spoof-of-a-sex-kitten pose. Shawn and Tilly are such a comically bizarre mismatch of mannerisms that it's almost worth sitting through Grasses of a Thousand Colors to see them together. Almost. Emily Cass McDonnell is a relatively restrained presence as Rose.

The physical production is thoroughly classy, including Eugene Lee's spare set; Howard Harrison's colorful lighting; Dona Granata's costumes; and Bill Morrison's video imagery of ruined landscapes and sinister cloudscapes. Bruce Odland's sound design efficiently mixes effects with his own original music, but I wish someone would wean Shawn away from his frequent use of microphones in a small theatre.

Whatever the good folk at the Public Theater are trying to achieve with their earnest talkbacks, surely the play is a confidence trick, an ostensibly serious statement about the environment that allows Shawn to indulge himself in his secret garden of erotic reveries. Whether you have the stomach for that is strictly up to you. As far as I can see, Grasses of a Thousand Colors is about the destruction of the environment in the same way that Valley of the Dolls is about Big Pharma.--David Barbour