Theatre in Review: Everything You Touch (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater/Cherry Lane Theatre)Everything You Touch opens on an attention-getting note with a fashion show set in 1974. The clothes are hilariously high concept, featuring provocatively skimpy outfits topped with towering headgear; there isn't a single outfit that anyone would wear in real life. Each design is suggestive of a different jungle animal, and, as each model reaches the end of the runway, she reacts as if taking a hunter's bullet. For a moment, I thought I was seeing a lost reel from The Eyes of Laura Mars. One of the models slips and falls, and the designer, Victor Cavanaugh, subjects the poor young thing to a takedown of epic proportions. Starting with an aria that describes the roots of his designs -- poverty, squalor, want -- he informs her, "You, Piper. You sleep in a sleigh bed at night, upholstered in a chintz of deep pink cabbage roses garlanded with blue ribbon and outlined with stage fringing. You eat rose and violet creams in it and read Barbara Cartland romances. The person I'm looking for slumbers on a metal grate under a tarp of nails and eats leather and roots and feces." After several paragraphs of this, Piper promptly goes out and hangs herself. Next, the action jumps ahead to the 21st century, where we meet Jess, a thirtysomething computer programmer with workaholic tendencies and an astoundingly laissez-faire approach to personal grooming. Jess' mother is dying of cancer back home but she can't face the woman who ruined her childhood with constant carping about her weight and looks. Hoping to clear her head with some recreational sex, Jess heads to a bar where she picks up, of all people, Victor -- who, three or four decades on, doesn't look a day older. After a three-day bedroom marathon, he agrees to go home with her to Arkansas. Discovering the connection between these two narratives is the main business of Everything You Touch, which, as long as it is savagely probing the self-absorption of the haute couture world, packs a certain nasty kick. Back in 1974, Victor is getting worried that his notoriety far exceeds his sales, given the bizarre clothing he creates under the inspiration of his muse, Esme, a former model who hasn't surrendered her striking looks or her formidable hauteur. Her latest concept is "a G.I. Jezebel cabaret show: military tailcoats, metal epaulets, shrapnel holes, rusty bullet belts, sequined camos. And septum rings made of hanging garnets! Nosebleed chic!" Meanwhile, perusing his inventory, Victor points out, quite reasonably, "Who wears a fucking $9,000 jacquard chiffon blazer cut for someone six foot three and 92 pounds? In the worst fucking economy since the Depression? As if the 16th century will ever come back into fashion?" The break in Victor's creative crisis comes with the arrival of Louella, a dowdy thing who, having won a radio contest, gets to spend time with the master in his atelier. Louella, who prefers polyester slacks and tops in patterns that don't quite match, is a hearty, friendly soul who comes bearing cupcakes. (Victor never eats; Esme's appalled reaction to the presence of sugary treats provides one of the evening's more memorable moments.) But Victor sees in Louella the prospect of a new muse, who will cause him to create clothing that all of America will be panting to purchase. Louella is so thrilled at the opportunity that she swears that she will never return home -- to Arkansas. At this point, you may think you know what links up Jess, Victor, Louella, and Esme, but in all probability you don't -- and to say more would spoil the twist is Everything You Touch's main attraction. Suffice to say that Jess, who is either hallucinating or who may have committed incest, takes weeks to travel home, using the time to turn herself into a glamorous fashionista. Back in the 1970s, Louella's influence turns Victor into a kind of Ralph Lauren figure, but his success only makes him feel more and more adrift. Meanwhile, Esme looks on disdainfully from the sidelines until the day she shows up to deliver a big surprise that changes everybody's lives. Callaghan has plenty on her mind -- the cruelties of couture, the struggle to maintain one's integrity as an artist, the way certain decisions have unintended consequences that ripple out over the years, and the challenge of learning to forgive the sins of one's parents. Her complex, time-traveling plot has a certain elegance to it but, on a psychological level, it makes no sense at all. Time and again, the characters are forced to violate their natures to fulfill their role in the author's grand design. Victor cheerfully cops to being a narcissist, but his occasional bursts of viciousness are jarring and Callaghan never really resolves how or why he exists in two time frames at once. (From time to time we are told about the trauma of his sister's death, but this idea is never explored.) Louella's transformation from a garrulous yokel to Victor's gatekeeper isn't really credible, and when we learn of the decisions that turned Jess' mother into a scold, they simply don't make sense. And, for all her rococo plotting, Everything You Touch climaxes in a fairly standard scene in which, at long last, Jess declares her emotional independence in front of her unconscious mother. The unevenness of the script is reflected in Jessica Kubzansky's direction. Christian Coulson, clad in outrageously striped bell-bottoms, smoking up a storm, and handling fabrics with the care a surgeon gives to vital organs, fully inhabits Victor's shallow soul, giving him a kind of borderline insane integrity that is often surprisingly compelling. Jess is much less fully realized, being defined mostly by her careless appearance, and until her eleventh-hour transformation, Miriam Silverman struggles to make her interesting. Both Esme and Louella are caricatures, so Tonya Glanz delivers the former's lines with a sneer and, as the latter, Lisa Kitchens carries on like a refugee from Hooterville. The most inventive staging device, which is in the script, features a trio of tall, willowy females dressed in flesh-colored unitards, who act as living scenery. When Jess goes to Chipotle for lunch, the models appear; one has a tiara of bottles of hot sauce and another has a basket of corn chips on her head. In a motel scene, one of models has a bra made out of a Gideon Bible and sports a telephone on her head; she bends over when Jess makes a phone call. It's the wickedly amusing work of the costume designer, Jenny Foldenauer, who also supplies some prime examples of outre '70s chic, modern-day grunge, and that opening fashion show. Otherwise, the set, by Francois-Pierre Couture, looks like a shop interior, with walls decorated with various mannequin limbs. Adam Flemming's projections don't add much, but Jeremy Pivnick's lighting and John Zalewski's sound design (and original music) are both solid. Callaghan is an imaginative writer, but she makes excessive demands on her characters, all of whom are too busy striking outrageous poses to be really engaging. The entire enterprise is brittle to a fault on the surface and surprisingly sentimental underneath. It's the old style-vs.-substance argument, and, this time out, substance is the loser, by a mile.--David Barbour 
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