Among all the competing voices in A Cure for Pain—a
Victorian doctor and his patient, a bickering couple, various organs
from the XX half of said couple—the womb gets the last word. And
it’s surprised: “So. The womb gets the last word. Interesting. Usually
I get the first word and nothing but ingratitude and disrespect after
that.”
This new play, by sometime Seattle resident Stephanie Timm, lurches
between characters as violently as the characters lurch toward and away
from each other. Libby Matthews plays the women (a nursing student
named XX and a young Victorian “hysteric” named Sylbernia), Trevor
Young Marston plays the men (XX’s boyfriend, named XY, and a young
Victorian doctor named Sandoval), and they both moonlight as the
organs. The organs get the best lines, which isn’t surprising. Timm is
a fabulist at heart, and her writing grows defter and stronger when she
loosens the bond of realism and lets her imagination flit, zigzag, and
make curlicues in the air. (In previous plays, she has written about a
girl who turns into an ape and the machinations of the Underground,
Very Secret, Hush Hush Ladies’ Serial Killer Club.)
This one-act’s more conventional relationships don’t have as much
texture or surprise. Dr. Sandoval diagnoses Sylbernia with “wandering
womb” syndrome and offers her the latest in gynecological medicine: a
nice pelvic massage. They fall in fraught, forbidden love. XX visits XY
during a college break: They realize they’ve grown apart and negotiate
the push-me, pull-you pangs of breaking up. The organs comment on the
action, suffering hangovers and heartbreak.
Marston and Matthews are adequate, if not quite equal to the job.
They make clean transitions between the play’s midscene jump cuts but
sometimes rush through the text. Other times, they chew on the words
like they’re balls of beef jerky. Either way, the language sounded less
a natural expression of thought than an obstacle to overcome. 
so cool