The premise of Sheila Callaghan’s Everything You Touch is so bizarre.
Jess, played by Kiki Abba, is a female coder working for a company on the coast. She learns that her mother’s health is failing and decides she must return home to make amends. But home sucks and her mom sucks. Growing up, Jess’s mom constantly administered withering critiques of her weight and appearance. This application of tough love ended up (surprise!) destroying Jess’s ability to see herself as a person capable of receiving love. All that sounds pretty standard, but here’s where it gets weird.
On her journey home to confront all that, five women who exemplify contemporary beauty standards follow her around wherever she goes. She’s also accompanied by Victor (played by Kevin Kelly), a misogynistic fashion genius who also serves as her lover, father, and maybe even just a figment of her imagination. Meanwhile, her officemate, Lewis (played by Mario Orallo-Molinaro)—who loves her for who she is—tries to keep her stable on her journey.
Jess gushes with lyrical language and wit as she navigates the paradoxes of walking around with a body in the world. You might find the ornate language a little tryhard, but it’s doing work. Jess pummels the audience with beautiful language just like the world pummels her with its ideals of beauty. She’s just giving back what she gets. And Abba deflates any pretension in the lines and delivers them effortlessly. While I’m mentioning standouts, I gotta give some love to Orallo-Molinaro, who was so casual and funny throughout the entire performance.
Director Maggie Rogers expertly reveals the million little mindfucks Callaghan threads through the script. The desire to be beheld, but not dissected. The desire for the gatekeepers of beauty standards to expand their definitions of beauty, not to just commodify the pain they inflict and then sell it back to us. The drama of hating ourselves for hating ourselves.
Her brilliance shines through in the way she stages the models. At certain points in the play, the models literally hold up tables in a fast casual Mexican restaurant while the main characters eat burritos. They serve as coat racks and hand characters objects. They mindlessly spout the double standards about how women should comport themselves, but they also literally and physically support Jess at certain times in the play.
Using beautiful women as props—and sometimes even props for props—leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but the metaphor reflects an uneasy reality. Beauty standards for women are oppressive, but they also arise from oppression. In this way women can use expressions of femininity—chic clothes, great makeup, thin bodies—as forms of empowerment. But embodying those beauty standards as a source of empowerment necessarily perpetuates those standards, which can disempower women who don’t or just can’t uphold them.
A wild scene towards the end of the play teases out this fucked up cycle. Jess fears she’ll disappoint her mom if she doesn’t “look good” beside her mother’s potential deathbed. So she allows Victor to dress her down with insults about her body, and then dress her up in a leopard-print power jacket that will shield her from her mother’s barbs. On one hand, she feels great in the jacket. On the other hand, she knows she only feels great in the jacket because she’s internalized her mother’s (and the culture’s) terrible and unfair criticism, which ruins the pleasure of feeling “great” in the jacket. When she actually meets her mother, however, this entire competition between internalized criticism and external pressures from the culture completely unravels, and she’s just a raw nerve in the middle of the stage.
But that’s how it goes with this play. Everyone (except for Lewis) is horrible to each other and no one seems to win. I still don’t know what I think about every element of this play, but I’m still thinking about it a week after seeing it. Go see it this weekend and join me in my weird little cloud of delight, sadness, and confusion.
