Theatre in Review: Placebo (Playwrights Horizons)

	Carrie Coon, Alex Hurt. Photo: Joan Marcus

The title of Melissa James Gibson's play refers to a trial for Resurgo, a new pill designed to promote female sexual desire. It is not, we are told, a distaff version of Viagra, which is only about "penile mechanics;" Resurgo "aims to get inside a woman's mind." But there's no drug for what ails Gibson's characters. Desire is largely AWOL in Placebo, and joy isn't even on the agenda. Instead, a miasma of anomie prevails in this itchy, anxious, scab-picking comedy of modern manners. And, when you don't want to give them a good slap, you're likely to notice how accurately these people are drawn.

The trial of Resurgo is being supervised by Louise, a graduate assistant, who herself is conducting research into female sexual fantasies. Her choice of subject is surprising, given her buttoned-up nature. "What's wrong with people knowing what you're thinking?" asks her boyfriend, Jonathan, when she refuses a neck rub. "I'm just not into it," she replies. On the job, however, Louise urges Mary, one of the trial's participants, to keep a detailed record of her feelings and sensations. Mary, who is only in her early 40s, is in a bad way, sex-wise: "I can't, um, get excited or motivated or into it," she says. "I guess you'd say it's hard to focus. I just can't, uh, finish." The context may change, but these words apply to everyone in Placebo.

Louise lives with Jonathan, who is unraveling over his unfinished dissertation on Pliny, the Elder. He is also withdrawn and borderline depressed, frequently suffering from writer's block. Currently, he is contemplating throwing out his work and starting over, much to the dismay of his advisor. Louise, eager to please her ailing mother, who is 59 and on an oxygen machine, announces that she and Jonathan are getting married; without saying so, she is deeply bemused by his complaisant acceptance of this deception. For diversion, she flirts with Tom, another graduate student, who is studying aural stimulation. In one of the many microscopic jokes that inflect Gibson's text, Tom complains that everyone thinks he is talking about "oral stimulation," and his office is across the hall from the group studying -- ha ha -- oral stimulation. In another example of her semi-wry observations, Tom, regarding a cup of water, says, "Life's elixir," adding, "unless you're drowning."

By now, it's probably clear that Gibson's characters have a few problems with maturity. If you need more evidence, consider this: At a department party, Louise, after too much boozy punch, extracts $37 from Tom and puts all of it into a vending machine. Each of them races across the room, punching a number into the machine and running away, until the money is gone and they are loaded with processed snacks. "Why is this so fun?" wonders Tom. "Nobody knows," says Louise. I'll second that.

Lest we be thoroughly put off by such banality and narcissism, Gibson freights her characters with plenty of self-doubt. Jonathan, in a panic over his dissertation, says, "What sort of idiot would choose to be a classicist in this day and age? I mean, who would actually choose to gaze at the navel of the literature of a dead language for a living?" Tom, referring to Resurgo, says, "Are we just trying to solve bougie problems for a bougie population because bougie problems get the bougie money that funds the bougie research that develops the bougie drugs that make the bougie world go round?" Louise defends any product that can help someone find happiness. "Happiness is the bougiest," says Tom. "That's a uniquely American perspective, thinking of happiness as a right....The rest of the world is over the moon if it achieves, um, subsistence."

And that's the way Placebo goes, laying out its characters' navel-gazing ways in merciless fashion, if only to comment that they are, you know, navel-gazers. In their emptiness, confusion, and especially in their pregnant pauses, they sometimes resemble Annie Baker's characters. But the people in The Flick or Circle Mirror Transformation tend to be marginal or out of options -- stuck in dead-end jobs in dying New England towns. Louise, Jonathan, and Tom seem far more privileged, and are, therefore, much harder to take. This isn't a question of liking them or identifying with them; it isn't even a question of Gibson's skill. The problem with Placebo is that Gibson is too honest a writer to make her characters gratuitously ingratiating -- or even moderately pleasant company.

Despite Placebo's structural oddities -- among other things, the Resurgo trial comes to seem almost totally irrelevant to the play's main action -- there's no question that Gibson is a playwright; she writes real scenes, in which, under a surface of flat-affect wisecracks, oddball digressions, and hair-splitting debates about the meanings of words, Louise is engaged in a real tug of war of Jonathan. And on those few occasions when direct communication takes place, the effect is striking. For example, when Jonathan asks Louise, "If the world perceived me as a card-carrying loser, would you still be with me?" the tiny pause that ensues totally invalidates the seemingly heartfelt "yes" that follows it. Daniel Aukin's direction supplies all sorts of revealing details: the slow-motion kung fu kick that Carrie Coon, as Louise, delivers to William Jackson Harper, as Jonathan, to express her exasperation; Coon desperately hugging Harper, who doesn't respond; Coon flinging laundry at Harper in a sudden fury. As Tom, Alex Hurt is totally in sync with the play's tone, whether hungrily devouring a sandwich that isn't his, airily dismissing his entire history with women, or musing on the plural form of clitoris. Florencia Lozano makes the most of her few appearances as Mary, who responds to Resurgo at first, but comes to feel that she has been given the placebo.

You could say that David Zinn's set design is as irresolute as the characters; he takes a unit approach, creating a single environment that is meant to stand in for Louise's apartment, the common area of the lab where she works, and a consulting room. In truth, it looks like none of them, even if Matt Frey's lighting makes good use of different color temperatures to suggest different lighting. Zinn's costumes nicely contrast Lozano's pricier wardrobe with the grad-student-casual look of the others. Ryan Rumery's sound design is solid.

Placebo ends on a tiny note of hope, although I'm not buying it; it may be the one concession Gibson makes to her audience. Otherwise, Placebo is both honest and tiresome, a piercing look at people who don't really seem to matter. In the language of Louise's study, it's a mood depressor. -- David Barbour