Annie Baker's "Body Awareness' at the Wilma (1st review)

Phyllis and Joyce live together in rural Vermont with Joyce's 21-year-old son Jared, who has Asperger's Syndrome and, while aspiring to be an etymologist and lose his virginity, holds down a job at McDonald's. Joyce teaches high school and, to Jared's disgust, has never read Dostoevsky and doesn't know who Raskolnikov is.

Phyllis, slightly higher on the pecking order, teaches at nearby Shirley State, and informs Joyce that Joyce can't consider herself an "academic" because she doesn't do research, organize conferences, or, well, know who Raskolnikov is.

Phyllis has in fact organized a conference centered on "body awareness," whose predictable theme is that we should love and accept ourselves as we are. Unfortunately, this goal is rendered difficult by the imperious "male gaze," which reduces women to the status of objects and makes their self-esteem a function of their submission to its standards and their ability to stimulate its desire. The antidote is feminism, in large and continuous doses.

One of the artists invited to the conference, however, hasn't been sufficiently vetted. This is Frank, a photographer who specializes in female nudes, and whose work is being exhibited in the conference's gallery.

Worse, Frank has wound up as the houseguest of Phyllis and Joyce. Enticed by his Svengali-like gaze, Joyce volunteers to pose for him. Phyllis, a lifelong lesbian who has only recently made a convert of Joyce, naturally sees Joyce's offer as both ideological backsliding and personal betrayal.

Middle-aged moustache

Frank is all the more maddening because, unlike your usual male oppressor, he seems a happy-go-lucky type who, comfortable in his own skin, just naturally induces members of the opposite sex to want to expose theirs. Still, even Frank can't help but notice Jared's physical misery.

Phyllis is semi-hysterical over an eyelid twitch (loss of control, don't you know), and Joyce stealthily bleaches her blossoming middle-aged mustache.

But Jared, a typical Asperger's case, can't imagine anything worse than his own nudity, unless it's someone else's. At the same time, he is desperate for sexual release. When Frank tries to give him a few helpful pointers about approaching the opposite sex, the results are predictably catastrophic.

Playwright Annie Baker's extended one-acter has fun with political correctness and its correlative obsession with body image, and she manages to keep her jokes just short of cruelty. The cast— Grace Gonglewski, Mary Martello, Dustin Ingram, and Christopher Coucill— is fine under Anne Kauffman's direction. The Wilma's opening-night audience laughed heartily from the beginning, willing to enjoy itself at the expense of accessible targets.

The Wilma's quandary

So why did the enjoyment seem empty? Perhaps on another stage it wouldn't have been so, but the Wilma made its reputation by taking risks and, after a period when it seemed to have surrendered to middlebrow entertainment, it has asserted its desire to offer more challenging fare. Our Class, the Holocaust meditation that opened its current season, fit that bill despite its flaws. Body Awareness, though, represents a step back, a bit of mid-season filler.

Twenty years ago, it might have seemed a novelty. Now, with the laughs triggered before the punch lines are delivered, it makes for an easy complacency. Theater ought to work us harder than that.♦


To read another review by Jackie Atkins, click here.
To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.