Theatre in Review: Teeth (Playwrights Horizons) Unless you ever attended a performance of Naked Boys Singing, Teeth will most likely feature the greatest number of penises you've ever seen onstage. Of course, in Naked Boys Singing, the organs in question were attached to their original owners. But that's the way things roll in this extremely literal-minded musical about a teenage girl who comes equipped with a vagina dentata, thereby making Stephen King's Carrie look like an ambassadress of love and peace. This is a high-class, high-profile version of the kind of high-concept show that once prevailed at the New York Musical Theatre Festival, a one-joke pitch that sounds bold and arresting in the abstract but withers when explained to death across a two-hour running time. Coasting almost entirely on outrage, it's like a John Waters film without laughs. Indeed, Teeth often feels like a discarded Waters project. The heroine, Dawn O'Keefe, lives in someplace called New Testament Village where she presides over her church's Promise Keeper Girls, all of whom have signed purity pledges. (In real life, Promise Keepers is an organization of Evangelical Christian men but whatever.) These young ladies are actively neurotic in their hands-off attitude toward the opposite sex, although the songs establish exhaustively that their performative piety is a massive act of sublimation: "Thanks for Jesus!" they sing. "His blood is like pure honey on my lips!/The gift he gave us! The gift he gave us!/Stays locked up tight in a box at the meeting of my hips." Which way to that Sunday School? Dawn is the too-prized stepdaughter of Pastor, a bully and sadist who gets a kick from beating the tar out of his son, Brad, a furious incel who spends most of his time on a virtual meeting platform communing with Godfather, a men's life coach who rails against the "feminocracy." "There's a pain all men carry, Truthseekers," he says. "Some of us carry it in our shoulders. Some in our stomachs. Some of us even carry it in our balls-in our nutsacks." It is here that Brad, who can't stand Dawn and her saccharin ways, reveals, "Her cooter isn't pure." The evidence: While playing doctor as children, one of his fingers was nearly bitten off. I can't believe I just wrote that. Anyway, Dawn, blissfully unaware of the canines lurking down below, has a gnawing hunger for her boyfriend Tobey. Of course, one thing leads to another, and they end up in a lake, sans clothing, going at it. But when Dawn panics in mid-coitus, the chompers come out, depriving Tobey of his manhood. Perhaps realizing that this development ices her chances of becoming homecoming queen, Dawn takes it on the lam, subsequently unmanning the rest of the male supporting cast. As it happens, they are all worthless louts; even her gay friend Ryan proves to be a twisted closet case who seduces her, streaming their encounter online to prove his heterosexual bona fides. Indeed, Teeth won't stop until all men are violently neutered, leading to the rise of a new goddess-centered culture and, one supposes, depressed population numbers. I could criticize Teeth for being puerile and vulgar, but that would be self-defeating: Those are its goals. If, as Freud suggested, wit is hostility dressed up in snazzy clothes, the musical is proudly witless, exhilarated by its nakedness. Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs' book, based on Mitchell Lichtenstein's screenplay, carpet-bombs its flimsy targets when pinpricks would do, its genitalia-filled punchlines becoming wearisome. Ryan, the closet case, sings about his online sexual activities, rhyming "cameras rolling" with "cornholing." A kooky gynecologist, who lives to regret booking an appointment with Dawn, notes, "Vaginas have long enchanted me/With their deep hidden depths/And their loops and whorls." A chorus of Promise Keeper girls, having fingered themselves and left bloody handprints on the set's walls, warns the men of this world, "Gonna get you with her poon, you dummy." (Jacobs' music has an occasional pop kick to it; Jackson's lyrics, well-represented here, are for you to judge.) If you decide to get in the stirrups and see Teeth, you will note that Alyse Alan Louis and Jason Gotay, cast as Dawn and Tobey, are fine musical theatre performers in need of better vehicles. Will Connolly and Jared Loftin do their best to smear the male gender as Brad and Ryan. In a bizarre triple turn as the borderline-psychotic Pastor, that crazed gynecologist, and the pontificating Godfather, Steven Pasquale, a fine actor not known for his light touch, is almost alarmingly enthusiastic. All are surely following the lead of Sarah Benson, whose production, aided by Raja Feather Kelly's choreography, often seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Speaking of breakdowns, Adam Rigg's bland, multipurpose room setting commits a spectacular act of self-destruction near the end, aided by Jeremy Chernick's special effects. The lighting, by Jane Cox and Stacey Derosier, is packed with more patterns, gobos, and lurid colors than any six other musicals in town. Enver Chakartash's costumes are solid, especially the Promise Keeper girls' unrevealing ensembles. ("Modest is hottest," we are told repeatedly in one number.) Palmer Hefferan's sound design manages a good balance between voices and musicians; she also provides some highly effective snapping effects for you know what. I assume there are more than enough theatregoers, eager to participate in overthrowing the patriarchy, to keep Playwrights Horizons filled during Teeth's run, although I suspect the show's long-term prospects are iffy. Then again, as Dawn announces late in the evening, "Our vaginal lips speak to a higher power than yours, Pastor." I'm not going to argue with that but pardon me while I cross my legs. --David Barbour 
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