Is it a coincidence that these productions—one a celebration
of honest gay bliss, the other an indictment of miserable straight
duplicity—both opened on gay pride weekend? The first, Zanna,
Don’t!, is a high-school musical that cavorts sweetly, an innocent
celebration of puppy love in all its flavors (mostly the gay ones). The
second, Orange Flower Water (by Craig Wright), is a grim,
slash-by-slash account of suburban hetero shame, with lies, affairs,
abuse, and the despicable usage of children as emotional
collateral.
The preshow tableau of Orange Flower Water tells you
everything you need to know: two middle-aged straight couples, brooding
in chairs at the far corners of the stage, with a queen-size bed (their
battleground) in the center. Children’s toys are strewn around the
edges of the theater. Brightly lit but never referenced, these toys are
symbolic hurdles—stumbling blocks for the married-with-children
as they try to flee their domestic lives.
In the first scene, David the pharmacist (Hans Altwies) tries to
seduce his friend’s wife, Beth (Betsy Schwartz), in a game of
make-believe:
These four walls. This picturesque Holiday Haven Motel. The cars
outside in the parking lot. Highway 59. It’s all… pixelating, like
little dots on a computer screen… I want you to put all thoughts of
this world out of your mind. And now the whole town of Pine
City—Lake Melissa, Sundberg’s Cafe, the Sandwich Hut, the
Voyageur—is all falling, falling through the clouds, dropping
through miles of clouds until you can’t even see it anywhere, Beth,
it’s a speck, and then it’s not even a speck, it’s gone. Good-bye, Pine
City.
But David’s spell does not—cannot—work. What happens in
the Holiday Haven Motel doesn’t stay in the Holiday Haven Motel. In the
counterpoint to the seduction scene, where Beth finally leaves Brad (a
brutish, angry video-store owner played by Ray Gonzalez), he shouts:
“You’re the one who said shit has to actually happen! All I’m
saying is, walk out the door and things will start to actually fucking
happen!”
The Sturm und Drang is all in the breakup: the couples negotiating
the terms of their separation (one fights, one fucks), a vicious
failure at reconciliation between the soccer moms at a kids’ game (“So
it’ll be just you and David,” David’s ex archly asks Beth: “Because you
should know he’s had a low sperm count for years”), and a mild fight
while Beth and David try to find a new love nest that will accommodate
their respective broods.
The script doesn’t get its tentacles too deeply into the fraught
material. Wright’s characters don’t always ascend—or
descend—to the condition of being human. Orange Flower
Water is sometimes the reverse of a Moonie wedding, with everyone
getting divorced: The scale is impressive, but it’s hard to become too
invested in any of the individuals involved. They’re all jerks, but
they aren’t interesting jerks.
The production, however, outshines the play. Director Allison Narver
fills each scene with its own gravity and intensity—any could be
its own short play (or song by the Mountain Goats), where the quiet
horror of romantic conflagration occasionally flares up through the
floorboards. On the sidelines of a kids’ soccer match, David pretends
not to notice the hints that Brad keeps dropping about infidelity. They
both know they know what’s going on, but neither has the guts to say
it.
When Brad and Beth finally duke out their separation—he is
wearing a barbecue apron and holding a spatula, she is carrying her
see-you-never luggage—the fire beneath the floorboards
explodes. In an uncharacteristic burst of rage, the normally hesitant
Beth shouts: “Every time you touch me, it feels like I’m being
raped!”
“I’ll throw you right now and fuck you right now, you fucking cunt!”
Brad bellows. “I oughta screw you right through this bed and straight
down to hell where you came from, you fucking cunt!”
The actors play their parts beautifully: Altwies is all sorrowful
lust; Gonzalez is dark, handsome, and full of impotent rage; Schwartz
is tearful and confused as she leaves one husband for another. Jennifer
Lee Taylor, as the abandoned Cathy, mournfully demands one last fuck
before David walks out the door. (That sex, sadly, is one of the
production’s weakest scenes. For such a moment of conflicted passion,
it was one of the least charged—especially the mid-coital
conversation about the Whole Foods parking lot.)
Orange Flower Water is the second outing for the ambitious
New Century Theatre Company. Their first production, a haunting, noir
version of The Adding Machine—chiaroscuro design, glaring
spotlights, the electric chair—was an invitation to a nightmare.
Orange Flower Water‘s nightmare is less searing, more
mundane.
If Orange Flower Water is a heterosexual house of horrors,
Zanna, Don’t! is a quick and giddy log flume into a pool of
glitter. A queer inversion of every teen-romance comedy from A
Midsummer Night’s Dream to Grease, Zanna, Don’t! begins in Heartsville High, an effervescent place where everyone’s as
gay as a purse of parrots, chess players are the sex symbols, and
football jocks are nobodies. (In two numbers, a group of gay militants
sing “Be a Man,” about the great gay leaders of Western
civilization—da Vinci, Alexander the Great, the
Spartans—and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a song about straight
soldiers forced to hide their love.)
The good fairy Zanna (a sprightly Justin Huertas) flits through this
gay paradise, uniting unlikely couples in song: “I seek out the truth,
I’m a love sleuth/I’m goin’ undercover for a lover who might not find
another.” The football dork Steve (Jared Michael Brown) falls in taboo,
hetero love with overachiever Kate (Sarah Davis), and Zanna comes to
the rescue. Zanna, Don’t! is satire of teen-hetero romance
throughout history, but it’s gentle satire, universally affectionate to
its subjects and their hackneyed heterosexual forerunners. Neither
raunchy nor pedantic, Tim Acito’s musical is a sweet and light thought
experiment in gay hegemony. It doesn’t look so bad. 
Confidential to Michael Jackson mourners: This Friday, July 3,
Fremont will try to dance its way into a Guinness World Record with a
“Thriller” dance-off at 9 pm at 3501 Phinney Ave N. See www.fremontoutdoormovies.com for more information.
