Like someone picking at an unhealed sore, Paula Vogel has always returned to the socio-sexual plight of women in her plays. Hot ’n’ Throbbing is an early work that faces the matter both head-on and obliquely, and its lively Brown Theatre and Sock & Buskin production (through November 19) expertly handles both perspectives.
Set in unspecified suburbs in the late 1980s, it centers around Charlene (Anne Troup), a single mother who is raising her two teenaged children by writing scripts for, well, take your pick. Call it female erotica, as she would have it. Or plain ol’ pornography, the term her children prefer to flog her with. But Sperms of Endearment was her homage to Jack Nicholson, she insists. Gyno Productions pays her well to pound out fantasies that show women taking control of their own sexual destinies.
Not so fast, Charlene. Easier said than accomplished. There’s that estranged husband, Clyde (Evan Smith), who shows up despite a restraining order, a surprise not entirely unwelcome by her. Woman-in-training Leslie Ann (Jessica Laser), her daughter, is a font of erupting hormones as uncontrollable to her as she is to her half-heartedly disciplinarian mother. Leslie Ann (or Layla, as she insists on being called) is both titillated and concerned when she confides a bondage fantasy to a shocked-silent sleepover friend. Meanwhile, her younger brother Calvin (Daniel Sobol) has his own squirrelly sexual development to contend with, what with peering from the shrubbery at her undressing and having an unholy attachment to his catcher’s mitt.
As Charlene taps away, there are voice-overs by the main character, a whip-wielding, booted dominatrix semi-clad in black vinyl, played by Aja Nisenson with good humor. The set design by Louisa Bukiet has her and a silent detective (Mark Brown II), who doubles as perve in a trenchcoat, traipse a runway that surrounds the main stage area, a reference to prancing fashion model mannequins, as a bonus.
Her son Calvin has been reading Moby Dick, that treatise on American obsessiveness, and Ulysses, presumably for Molly Bloom’s heavy breathing in the last lines. But he has also been reading his mother’s password-protected writing, which he honestly appreciates. Sobol gives Calvin a streak of adolescent angst as hyperactive as sister Leslie Ann’s rebelliousness. Director Ken Prestininzi is attentive to opportunities, never more so than when he allows Calvin’s howling freakout to extend to runaway rocket duration when he sees his supposedly out-of-the-picture father kissing his mother. As for Leslie Ann, we’re worried about the template she’s creating for future men in her life, worried as much about her glee at seeing her father in the first place as about his creepy talk about appreciating her growing into a woman and his horsing around and tickling her on the couch.
Clyde, this restraining-order dad, comes into the play late, when both children have conveniently fled for a while. At first we don’t know what to make of him. He comes on strong, with the macho swagger he learned from the movies and TV, we assume, rather than from actual confidence. Charlene deflates him, literally, by shooting him in the butt. He softens toward her, but we know — we’ve heard this story too often — that this all will end with less entertaining violence. Commendably, Smith humanizes Clyde, shows him suffering, so that we can’t merely dismiss him, however much we end up despising the character.
