It's like something from the Christopher Durang playbook: a lesbian psychology professor, her lover, and her lover's son, a deadpan social misfit and intellectual savant who may or may not have Asperger's syndrome. At the college where the professor teaches, a weeklong event is underway about body awareness, but as she tells us in taut, pithy monologues laced with academic-speak, the event actually touches on many things -- female objectification, exploitation photography, being ashamed of one's body. There's also an exhibit of female nude photography by a man who, like his work, is rude, wise, and chauvinistic -- and a guest in the ladies' home.
But this isn't a Durang play -- it's Body Awareness, an Annie Baker play, in a production superbly staged by Karen Kohlhaas for Atlantic Theater Company.
In the best sense, Mary McCann delicately plays Phyllis, the professor. Though Phyllis is a surefire feminist, McCann plays her combative edges without alienating us from her world. Indeed, she often recedes from the spotlight during scenes with JoBeth Williams, who plays Joyce, Phyllis' lover, offering the most satisfying and surprising performance of the night. A high school teacher, Joyce seems ill-defined at first -- how she embraced her sexuality or how she became inspired, Phyllis' protests aside, to pose for the photographer, is left relatively unexplored. But Williams plants seeds with her acting that yield fruit later on.
Then there's Jared, Joyce's developmentally challenged son, endowed with vivid life by Jonathan Clem, a brand-new NYU graduate making a memorable Off-Broadway debut. We're told in due course about the symptoms of Asperger's -- an inability to empathize, strong feelings of physical inadequacy. Jared has them all, but unlike the kookiness one might encounter in the characters of Durang or David Lindsay-Abaire, Jared -- like Body Awareness in general -- is all about the struggle to face one's deficiencies, even if they involve blurting out insults, threatening to commit murder, reading dictionaries for pleasure, or carrying an electric toothbrush like a security blanket at 21 years old.
In Baker's world, political correctness has its place in society; a weeklong confab on body typing being one possible manifestation of it. Yet Body Awareness also delights in the absurdity of PC, which is what the photographer, Frank, represents. Early on he calls Phyllis "honey" -- a war chant to a feminist lesbian, but as shown by Peter Friedman's spot-on performance, something that actually means little harm. Well, perhaps there's some misogyny in the way Frank interrupts Phyllis and Joyce when they speak, or in his hijacking a tense family dinner with a suggestion to perform Friday night Shabbos prayers on a Tuesday. But there's an emotional grounding within Frank, not to mention charm. No wonder Phyllis is so threatened by him.
But while Friedman's performance projects some of the sour sides of sexist male heterosexuality -- the victimizing of women with what Phyllis calls "the male gaze" -- we're never cornered into loathing Frank. Ironically, he turns out to be the one character that maladjusted Jared relates to; a scene in which Jared asks Frank for advice about getting a girlfriend is wonderfully tragicomic, ushering in the play's climax.
Watch the actors' blocking -- especially when, on Walt Spangler's nicely sprawling set, they cook or eat or change clothes. One never knows whether a bit of staging is the director's idea or the performer's, but you get the sense that Kohlhaas recognizes her cast's wonderful self-possession, that she meddles only as needed and lets her actors do the rest. That's called staging a play invisibly, which Kohlhaas does with body and soul.
Presented by Atlantic Theater Company
at Atlantic Stage 2, 330 W. 16th St., NYC.
June 4-22. Tue.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.
Casting by MelCap Casting.
