Honey Pot: Adolescent Girls in Sticky Situations

by Toby Zinman

Continuing a mini-season of plays about and by girls/women, Brat Productions offers three one-acts by three playwrights, linked by the umbrella subtitle "adolescent girls in sticky situations." Each short play is perceptive and disturbing, and although none of the acting is quite up to the demands of the material, the cumulative effect is moving.

The first of the trio is "The Amazing Adventures of Estro-Jen," by Madi Distefano. We find a girl -- I'd guess she's supposed to be about 11 years old -- in her bedroom full of stuffed animals, wearing pink pajamas and a makeshift cape made from a bra (with sparkle stickers on it) and a towel. She is playing superhero, and through much of the play we watch her narrate battles between Estro-Jen and her nemesis, Test Tyrone. When it's "Affirmation Time" she sings "everybody look at me" and Barbie and Ken occasionally get into the act. It's way too long and too tedious, but eventually we discover that her "sticky situation" is anorexia, and that she longs to weigh 44 pounds the way she did when she was 4 years old. Distefano captures the complex fascination with/rejection of sexuality in anorexic adolescents, and Julianna Zinkel conveys a desperate hysteria that ultimately rings true.

The second play is "The Wheels on the Bus Go," by Clay McLeod Chapman, about a deaf girl who, for complicated reasons, becomes the sexual partner of a deaf boy on the back seat of a "quiet bus going to a quiet school." There are insights into a deaf girl's life, how fingers are "ten tongues" and how silent sex is deeply different from sex for hearing people, since the sense of touch is so heightened. Tracy Weber signs the story and Kate Bailey translates it for the audience.

The last, "Slipdress," by Arden Kass, is a ripped-from-the-headlines story about a sullen, blue-fingernailed teenager, played by Chrysty Wheeling, who tries to deny her pregnancy up until the night of her high school prom when she delivers the dead (?) baby in the girls' room, and, having tidily disposed of the "slimy thing" as well as the afterbirth, she returns to Kenny and the prom. The focus of her emotions is her relief that through the entire ordeal, her slipdress remains undamaged and unbloodied.

The show's umbrella title, "Honey Pot: Adolescent Girls in Sticky Situations," strikes me as cruelly cute and unsympathetic, and thus fairly adolescent itself.

Honey Pot: Adolescent Girls in Sticky Situations

Through May 9, Brat Productions at Christ Church Annex, Second and Church sts., 215-431-0975

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