Theater in Review: Bite Me (WP Theater and Colt Coeur/McGinn-Cazale Theatre)

	David Garelik, Malika Samuel. Photo: Carol Rosegg

High school is enough of an ordeal without tossing in complicating factors like class, money, and race, but that's the toxic concoction assembled by Eliana Pipes in Bite Me,, a brutally honest two-hander about adolescence and its aftermath. She throws together a pair of outsiders, attending a "suburban public high school in a 'good' district'." But they spend their time holed up in a storage closet, hiding from those who wish them ill -- a group that, at times, seems to constitute the entire student body.

Melody, possibly the only Black student on campus -- her parents moved heaven and earth to get her enrolled out of her home district -- avoids the mean girls who humiliate and/or ignore her; in her solitude, she keeps busy with a homework-for-hire business. Her principal customer is Nathan, a hoodie-wearing, drug-dealing rebel without a cause. Coming from a well-off family and usually flush with cash, he nevertheless suffers from kleptomaniacal tendencies, early on producing a box of his random takings to impress Melody. Their relationship is, initially, entirely transactional, yet they can't help warily drawing together. Their road to intimacy is pockmarked with oddball details: He gives her a makeup pouch stolen from one of her tormentors; she passes him answers to a test by discreetly flashing a thigh.

Their delicate balance is upended when Nathan's brother is arrested on a drug charge. Already on edge, he goes haywire when Melody reaches out to him in public, cueing a terrible confrontation that leaves her with an emotional wound as indelible as the second-degree cigarette burn on the back of his hand. Eleven years later, attending a school reunion, they meet up again, under markedly altered circumstances. But the balance of power between them has shifted, setting up a raw confrontation that exposes the depth of the damage incurred years earlier.

Pipes is a tough, unsentimental reporter of the details -- Adderall, alienation, bullying, whiskey, cigarettes, and self-harm -- of being young and troubled in the early 2000s. (The era is well established by sound designer Tosin Olufolabi with a preshow playlist that includes Maroon 5's "This Love" and Sean Paul's "I'm Still in Love with You.") Nathan is spiky, defensive, the kind of kid who sneers pre-emptively to scare off attackers. Melody is itchy, uncomfortable in her own skin, yearning to be seen; even when walking the school's halls, accessorized in items thieved by Nathan from their fellow students, she remains invisible. For both, romance is hard to find: Nathan's longtime girlfriend "doesn't get nervous unless I'm blacked out in a ditch," he notes. Melody has a flirtation that comes and goes without amounting to anything. Through it all, she and Nathan insist that they are just friends; yet, a decade later they remain trapped, unhappily, in each other's heads.

Under Rebecca Martínez's acutely observant direction, you're likely to feel the persistent tension between two characters who care deeply about each other yet cannot break past the social barriers that separate them. In Malika Samuel's deeply nuanced characterization, Melody is fragile, shying away from the everyday cruelties handed out to her yet delightfully scandalized by Nathan's transgressive acts. But strong emotions are churning under her surface, revealed, startlingly, in a moment of raw pain and fury. There's a knife-edge quality, a hint of menace spiked with notes of sadness and vulnerability in David Garelik's Nathan. Speaking of his unloved parents, he says, with false bravado, "Rob and Marsha have given up on me. But it's fine. I'll die in my twenties and then they'll be sorry and that'll be my revenge." Given such remarks, it's little wonder he is horrified that Melody is unaware of the existence of James Dean.

Martínez and her actors don't miss a detail in exploring this fraught, would-be affair, noting the tiniest shift in feeling between Melody and Nathan. Especially telling is the moment when, standing behind her, he comes achingly close to an embrace before withdrawing. Later, much humbled by life, Garelik vividly evokes Nathan's confusion as he attempts to make amends for the past without taking responsibility for his most vicious impulsive act. Samuel achieves a startling transformation as the adult Melody, wrapped in corporate armor against a world that doesn't value Black women.

The production benefits from a solid, sensible design evoking a bleak secondary school landscape. Chika Shimizu's set places the storage closet on a raised deck at center stage, surrounding it with an installation made up of lockers, desks, sinks, fans, and windows with touches of stained glass. Lucrecia Briceno's lighting is most effective in a sequence that bridges the play's dual time frames. Sarita Fellows' costumes effectively demonstrate how much the right clothes can morph teenagers into adults.

Bite Me takes a bit of time to get going; as it neared the halfway point, I began to wonder if it might be little more than a list -- admittedly, an evocative one -- of adolescent woes. But the playwright carefully lays a snare that entangles her protagonists in a web of need and grievance from which there may be no escape. They emerge from their final, bruising battle unable to let go and unwilling to forgive; one shudders to think what will happen the next time they meet, whenever that might be. --David Barbour