For some reason, it’s still hard to debate the realities and impacts of feminism without falling down a stupid-hole. That’s not to say it’s impossible, or even that taking a detour to the dumbed-down side is all that harmful, if done with purpose. But I do like my feminism complex and connected to other things (they call it “intersectional,” don’t you know), and I’d prefer it acknowledge more than one or two possible lifestyles.

So Rapture, Blister, Burn by Gina Gionfriddo presents a bit of a problem. Set in backyards and living rooms in a small college town, Rapture is a story about two caricatures, the Career Woman and the Stay-at-Home Mom, fighting over the mom’s boring husband, Charming Stoner Dad in Sandals. (They do have real names in the show, but you can picture these cut-outs already, right?) The lessons learned are sometimes actual classroom lectures about the history of the women’s movement, and grown women fight over a lazy, sad man while Comic Relief Grandma and Young Person of Today drop jokes about sex. It literally ends with a toast to outspoken antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly.

But under all that crap frosting, there is a real debate: How do we use what we believe to be ethically and intellectually correct when we’re just being dumb animals out in the world, fucking and fucking up, wandering and nesting, just trying to find a warm hole for our bodies or our hearts?

Catherine, the Career Woman (played by Kirsten Potter) slowly unravels—as she falls apart, Potter’s taut limbs loosen and swing—while Kathryn Van Meter plays the happy-on-the-surface mom, Gwen, as the blinkingest woman of all time. You know, dinner-plate eyes, puppyish smile, blink. Blink. Blink. You can almost see metaphorical cracks appearing for real on her face, like she’s a porcelain dish with hot coals inside.

The fun really comes from Mariel Neto’s Avery, a 21-year-old student who’s there to repeatedly point out that this mortal combat between the only two kinds of woman you’re ever allowed to be is bullshit, that she can see a way out, and it’s not marching in lockstep with any particular era of feminism, nor is it throwing it all to the wind and diving on the first dick you can find. It’s just being a person—she still thinks she’s a person. By the end of the play, she’s inaugurated into a sort of sisterhood that supersedes personhood, where they teach her the lessons of womanhood (spoiler! You will have to choose between having an unfulfilling lifelong heterosexual relationship or being intellectual and professionally successful but never snagging that man). About halfway through, Avery says in the middle of a lecture, “Is the message that women are just fucked either way?” In this world, it seems to be. Maybe it’s a lesson only the young can reject. But I’d still say reject it for as long as you can.