Presented by Propinquity Productions LLC in association with Lightning Strikes at Under St. Marks, 94 St. Mark's Place, NYC, March 2–April 20, Wednesday nights only.
"We'll go to restaurants. I'll stop killing old people." Jan, Beth's new co-worker (and lover), has issues: She carries all her belongings in a knapsack. She gets sensual pleasure from burning her arm with cigarettes. And she's obsessed with snuffing out the lives of terminally ill patients at the nursing home where they both work.
But when you're as deeply smitten as Beth, you're willing to go along with almost anything.
That's the gist of "I Found Her Tied to My Bed," a new play by Jeff Tabnick ("Barrymore's Body"). Directed by the playwright, the hourlong drama relates the brittle relationship between two young nurse's aides, both of whom struggle with deeply self-destructive tendencies.
After a night out with the girls, mercurial newcomer Jan (Shannon Kirk) wakes the next morning strapped to Beth's (Talia Rubel) bedposts. Though upset, she doesn't leave. A month later, Jan is a daily houseguest. Their relationship is uneasy: Jan seems to enjoy shocking the milder Beth, practicing self-mutilation and claiming that she has been suffocating patients in the terminal ward. Things spiral out of control when—in an attempt to prove herself to Jan—Beth decides to match her actions.
As a writer, Tabnick does a mostly good job of creating two complicated women who seem to live in their own separate world (though his Mametesque dialogue sometimes becomes repetitious). His direction, however, is timid: He skirts the play's darker elements, and the characters' violent sides never fully flower. As a result, the play never catches fire.
Rubel gives a clear sense of Beth's intense longing and vulnerability, but Kirk fails to find a consistent note with which to play such a mentally unstable woman.